Live Bait (21 page)

‘Good point.’ Malcherson nudged his plate in Gino’s direction, then glanced at his watch. ‘If you two really believe Morey Gilbert, Rose Kleber, and Ben Schuler were connected beyond their common experience as concentration camp survivors, I assume you’re examining their records, phone bills, bank statements, that sort of thing.’

Well, yes, they were, Magozzi thought; but not exactly through the proper channels. ‘We’re handling that, sir.’

‘Really. Handling it how? I haven’t seen a warrant cross my desk –’ He stopped abruptly and looked at Magozzi. ‘Never mind. Don’t answer that.’

Malcherson knew full well about Magozzi’s continuing relationship with Grace MacBride, who could hack her way into any supposedly secure database. He also knew that his best detective – a man who wouldn’t loosen his tie on the job because it violated department dress code – had developed a troubling impatience with privacy laws and civil rights and department procedure when he thought lives were at stake. Warrants took time. Checking records took time, and the temptation to take shortcuts was enormous for a cop who thought he was fighting the clock to find a killer. Malcherson understood the temptation as well as anyone, but also understood that once you started breaking the rules, it was hard to stop, and one of the most dangerous things in the world was an officer of the law who thought he was above it. ‘Detective Magozzi . . .’

‘We’re trying to move pretty fast on this, Chief,’ Magozzi interrupted. ‘We don’t know if there are other targets out there.’

‘I know that.’

‘Old, defenseless, terrified targets,’ Gino inserted around a mouthful of eggs. ‘Cookie-baking grandmas like Rose Kleber.’

‘Detective Magozzi,’ Malcherson repeated in a tone that quieted both his detectives. ‘If you intend to ask Grace MacBride and her associates to use the program that worked so well finding links on our cold cases, remind her to access only that information in the public domain.’

‘I’ll do that, sir. But we aren’t just waiting for something in the records to pop. Like we said in the report, we think Jack Gilbert knows something, and we’re going to hit him hard today.’

‘Then I wish you all the luck in the world. As far as the press and the public are concerned, it looks like this killer has a very specific demographic target group, and those people are starting to panic.’ He folded his hands together and looked down at his shiny gold watch. ‘Do you recall the dire predictions the press was making when the legislature passed the new conceal-and-carry law?’

Gino snorted. ‘Oh yeah. They were singing the dark song. Millions of Minnesotans packing, gunning each other down in the streets. And you know what? I didn’t hear a word on the news when the new applications fizzled down to near nothing.’

Malcherson’s eyes slid to Gino. ‘Yesterday alone there were three hundred seventy-three new applications to carry a concealed weapon. That was in Hennepin County. Our county, gentlemen. Three hundred of those applications were filed by people over the age of sixty-five.’

‘Holy shit . . . sir.’

Malcherson flinched at the vulgarity. ‘That was before Ben Schuler’s murder was reported. I expect the numbers could go even higher today, especially now that we’ve earned national attention. CNN headlined it last night; the other networks will have it by the evening news, and that, gentlemen, is really going to stir the pot.’

Gino threw up his hands. ‘What’s the matter with these people? If I was a national reporter sifting the wire reports I’d jump on the old guy who was tortured and tied to a train track.’

Malcherson sighed. ‘It was one murder. Sensational, yes, but there are dozens of sensationalistic murders every day in this country. You, on the other hand, are working three murders, and even if no one says “serial” aloud, they’re thinking it. That in itself is enough to garner national attention. Add to it the incomprehensible horror of someone murdering elderly survivors of the death camps, and the eyes of the country will be on you.’

Magozzi felt a tickle deep inside his head, as if little brain cells were standing up and waving their arms, trying to get his attention. He closed his eyes and frowned hard, concentrating.

‘What is it, Detective?’ Malcherson asked.

Magozzi opened his eyes and looked at the chief. ‘I don’t know. It’ll come to me.’

By the time Magozzi and Gino left Chief Malcherson at the diner, the sun had risen high into a hazy, almost-white sky. The air was soupy and oppressive, and the mercury was already courting the eighty-degree mark. When they turned west on 394, they could see the haze starting to gel on the horizon, stirring the sky.

‘There she comes,’ Gino remarked, looking up from his pointless fiddling with the buttons on the car’s useless air conditioner. ‘Canadian cold front is finally dropping, and when that baby gets here, we’re going to have the clash of the Titans.’

‘They said sometime tonight,’ Magozzi said. ‘The whole state’s under a tornado watch.’

‘How weird is that? Two weeks ago I was shoveling five inches of snow off the driveway; now we’re poaching in our own sweat watching the sky for funnel clouds.’

‘Welcome to Minnesota.’

Twenty minutes later Magozzi was guiding the unmarked along the scenic, curving streets of a wooded development that tried hard to look like Minnesota wilderness. It had all the elements – enormous stands of mature trees, the bubbling rush of creeks fed by snowmelt and spring rains – but nature had not groomed these places. This was what some community planner thought nature was supposed to look like.

There was no fallen brush between the trees, no canted branches to mark the passage of the last storm, and if one leaf had dared to fall on the unmarked tar last autumn, it had long since been swept away.

There were no lots in this part of Wayzata. Here, everyone had ‘acreage,’ and only occasionally could you catch a glimpse of the enormous homes set far back from the street, artfully concealed by strategic landscaping.

Gino was looking out the window with a deeply suspicious expression. ‘Okay, now this is just not right. There are no potholes in this road. It’s spring in Minnesota, for chrissake. You’re supposed to have potholes. And the damn tar looks polished. You get a load of that house we just passed on the hill back there?’

Magozzi shook his head, eyes on the road as he negotiated a hairpin turn that followed the natural course of what was clearly a very confused creek. ‘There has to be another way to Jack Gilbert’s house. No way he could drive this street drunk.’

‘I don’t know. Might help to be drunk. Man, this thing twists like an intestine.’

‘Really pretty imagery, Gino.’

‘Thank you. I kind of like all the curves, actually, and the only place you find them anymore is in some kind of hoity-toity development. Pisses me off how MnDOT straightens all the roads as if none of us had steering wheels. The whole damn state’s turning into one big ugly grid pattern . . . Uh-oh. What do we got here?’

Magozzi had seen the first of the flashing lights peeking around the curve ahead, and had already started to apply the brakes. The closer they got, the more vehicles they saw, all with light bars flashing. There were four Wayzata police cruisers, an ambulance, security rent-a-cop cars, the fire department’s first-responder truck, and worst of all, a couple of satellite vans from the local TV stations.

Magozzi came nose to door with a WPD car blocking the road. ‘What do you bet that’s Gilbert’s place up there?’

Gino’s voice was tense. ‘Goddamnit. We should have pinned him down last night. I’m going to hate myself if that drunken son of a bitch is dead.’

A tall, blond, buff patrolman who looked like a
GQ
model walked up to the driver’s side. Magozzi held up his badge. ‘Minneapolis Homicide. Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth. Is that the Gilbert house?’

‘Yes sir, it is. But we don’t have a homicide here.’

Gino and Magozzi sighed in a relieved duet.

‘Glad to hear it, Officer. So what happened? We were hoping to catch Jack Gilbert for a couple questions on a Minneapolis case we’re working. He’s not hurt, is he?’

The officer looked back toward the phalanx of vehicles. ‘I don’t think so. Nothing visible, anyway. The med techs are looking him over now, but he’s pretty shook-up. Says somebody tried to kill him.’

Gino and Magozzi exchanged a glance. ‘We need to get in there and talk to him, Officer. Any problem with that?’

‘I’m sure there isn’t, Detective, but you might want to talk to Chief Boyd first, get some background on what’s been happening here. Gilbert’s version is a little garbled. Hang on, I’ll get him for you.’

They barely had time to get out of the car before Wayzata’s police chief came over and introduced himself. If anything, he was better-looking than his patrolman, with just a little more age on him. Magozzi decided you had to be a pretty person to live in Wayzata.

‘It’s a real pleasure to meet you, Detectives.’ Chief Boyd flashed a spectacular set of pearly whites. ‘You did some amazing work on that Monkeewrench case last fall. You’re on the Uptown murders now, right? I read Gilbert’s dad was one of the victims.’

‘That’s right,’ Gino said. ‘We were on our way to talk to Jack Gilbert, clear up a few things, when we ran into your parade. You got a pretty heavy call-out here, Chief. What happened?’

‘Last night, or this morning?’

Gino raised his brows. ‘Last night?’

‘That’s when it started. About eleven
P
.
M
. Gilbert dialed nine-one-one in a panic. He said he thought he had an intruder on the grounds, so we sent out a couple of cars to take a look. They went over the property pretty thoroughly, but couldn’t find anything, and to tell you the truth, the boys shrugged it off as a false alarm. Mr Gilbert was . . .’ He paused diplomatically.

‘Drunk out of his friggin’ mind?’ Gino suggested, and Chief Boyd smiled, almost apologetically.

‘Well, he had just come home from burying his father,’ he said, making Gino feel like a heartless son of a bitch. ‘And I think he’s been going through a really rough patch for a while now. We’ve had some problems; stopped him a few times on the road, saw to it that he got home safely.’

Gino looked at Magozzi. ‘I want to live here.’

‘Then this morning,’ the chief continued, ‘we received calls from just about everybody within earshot about gunfire at the Gilbert house. Jack Gilbert was close to hysterical and waving a gun when we got here, and the yard and his wife’s car were pretty shot up.’

‘Jesus,’ Gino murmured. ‘Someone really was trying to kill him.’

‘Well, we’re not so sure about that. There’s a lot of damage, and a lot of brass around, but so far it’s all 9-mm. Slugs, too. We dug a couple of those out of the garage siding and some tree trunks.’

‘Which means?’ Magozzi asked, and the chief lifted one shoulder in an awkward shrug.

‘The gun Mr Gilbert was holding was a Smith & Wesson 9-mm, still warm, and he told us outright he’d emptied the clip trying to hit whomever he thought was shooting at him. We’ll send everything to the lab, of course, just in case there were two men shooting two different 9-mm’s out here.’

Magozzi studied him for a moment. ‘You don’t think there was another shooter at all, do you?’

Chief Boyd looked down at the polished tar beneath his polished boots and sighed. ‘You know, Jack Gilbert’s lived here ten years – as long as I’ve been chief – and he’s always been a little . . . eccentric. But overall, a hell of a nice guy. Then about a year or so ago he just started to unravel. A lot of drinking, a lot of complaints from the neighbors, and as I said, we’ve had to pull him off the road more than once. One time I was driving down the main street in town on my way to lunch, and there’s Mr Gilbert strolling the sidewalk in front of the shops in his bathrobe and not much more. I put him in the car in record time, but when I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing parading around downtown in his robe, he looked down at himself and said, “Holy shit.” I swear to God, the man didn’t realize he wasn’t dressed. Almost locked him up right there, just so the Court would order a psych evaluation and get him some help.’

‘Might have been a kindness,’ Gino said.

Chief Boyd chuckled softly. ‘Unfortunately, the residents of this community do not think it’s a kindness when their police officers arrest them, no matter how good the intentions. I’ll tell you, this job is more political than I ever wanted to be.’

Magozzi nodded in understanding. ‘We run into the same thing in the city sometimes. If a patrol gets a judge blowing point-one-oh on the Breathalyzer, you know he’s gotta wonder if the arrest is going to come back to haunt him next time he’s got a case in front of the bench. Sad but true.’

The chief looked off into a patch of painfully pruned woods. ‘My officer tells me you wanted to question Gilbert. He’s pretty messed up. I hope you’re not going to tell me he’s a suspect in the Uptown killings.’

Magozzi smiled. ‘You like him, don’t you?’

‘I guess I do. I get a feeling from him, like he’s one of the good people that just got lost somewhere along the way.’

‘Well, for what it’s worth, we’re not looking at him as a suspect right now, but we think he might be holding something back that could help us out. We just want to talk to him.’

They found Jack Gilbert slumped in the back of the ambulance, dressed in shorts and a polo shirt, bare legs dangling over the edge. He looked like precisely what he was – a heavy drinker coming off a long-term toot. Bleary, pouched eyes, sallow complexion, and a looseness around the mouth that made it look like it was melting. There was a butterfly bandage on his forehead, and he was holding a cold pack on his cheek. He looked up as they approached and toasted them with a bottle of water.

‘Hey, guys. Welcome to the burbs. Little out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you?’

‘How are you doing, Mr Gilbert?’ Gino asked.

‘Doing fine. Little cut up here, little smackeroonie right here.’ He wiggled the cold pack. ‘Probably ran into a god-damned tree, can’t really remember, otherwise I’m just aces.’

Magozzi moved in a little closer until he and Gino had Gilbert flanked. ‘Are you going to the hospital?’