Live Bait (28 page)

A few minutes later Gino had forgotten the mysteries of Grace MacBride as he gazed happily at a layer cake with a gleaming shell of chocolate. ‘Jesus, Magozzi, cut the damn thing. I’m dying here.’

‘You’re lucky I didn’t dump it on your head. What the hell was that all about?’

‘That was about me, taking care of you.’

‘Well, stop it. Grace is right. It’s none of your business.’

‘Well, that’s about the dumbest thing you ever said.’

Now Magozzi was staring at him, and Gino didn’t have a bit of trouble reading his expression. He raised his hands in surrender. ‘All right, all right, maybe I went a little too far. I apologize. I want to make up. Let’s cut the cake and toast our reconciliation with chocolate.’

Grace walked in and tossed a printout on Gino’s cake plate, intentionally, he was sure. ‘We have a couple of hits, the first on one of the Interpol victims. Charles Swift, retired mason murdered in Paris during one of the trips your victims made together. His real name was Charles Franck.’ She pointed to a place halfway down the page. ‘Convicted at Nuremberg; served fifteen years for war crimes.’

Gino and Magozzi were silent as they read the pertinent paragraph a few times, letting it sink in.

‘Anything on the others?’ Magozzi finally asked.

Grace shook her head. ‘This one had been caught. He was in the system, so when he changed his name after he served his time, he had to do it legally, which made the records easy to find. If the others were Nazis, too, they were probably under pretty tight cover.’

Gino sucked in air through the side of his mouth. ‘I told Langer if the Feebs wanted this case they had something he didn’t. What do you bet it was the goods on this Swift character. Really nice work, Grace.’

‘Don’t try to make up with me, Gino.’ She placed another printout on the table, this one with an old black-and-white photograph of several men wearing the unmistakable garb of the S.S. Grace had circled one of the faces. ‘That’s Heinrich Verlag, bad boy at Auschwitz, a.k.a. Arlen Fischer, sixty years and a hundred and fifty pounds ago.’

Magozzi looked down at the picture. The pieces were finally coming together. ‘Morey Gilbert was at Auschwitz. So was Ben Schuler.’

It was the confirmation they had been hoping for and dreading, all at the same time, and Grace saw the conflict in their faces. ‘I will never understand cops,’ she complained. ‘You come here looking for information, I give you exactly what you ask for, and now you’re depressed. Your old people were Nazi killers. That’s what you thought, wasn’t it?’

Gino nodded, his face glum. ‘Yeah, that’s what we thought. But we were kind of hoping they didn’t kill anybody. That we had this nice, normal psycho serial killer bumping them off instead.’

Magozzi’s mouth turned down in unhappy resignation. ‘These were nice people, Grace. Ben Schuler was a lonely old man who passed out ten-dollar bills to inner-city kids on Halloween. You should hear his neighbors talk about him. Rose Kleber was this sweet little old grandmother who loved her family, a cat, and her garden. And Morey Gilbert did more good for other people in a day than I’ll ever do in a lifetime. We prove they were cold-blooded killers, and all that is gone.’

Grace’s sigh was irritated. ‘You know as well as I do that people are not always what they seem, Magozzi. Besides, they weren’t killing innocents. The Nazis were the bad guys.’

It startled him a little, the way she said that – flat-out, pragmatic, a casual justification for vigilantism. It threw a light on the great differences between them, and Magozzi could almost feel his heart squinting at the sight. ‘You know the worst thing about bad people, Grace? It’s what they make good people do.’

A little later, when they were leaving, Grace touched Gino’s arm at the door, holding him back as Magozzi started down the walk toward the car. ‘I’m trying, Gino,’ she said very quietly, following Magozzi with her eyes.

Gino wasn’t a hundred percent sure he knew what she meant, exactly, but when she looked up at him, he got a glimpse of what Magozzi saw – this haunted little excellent woman treading water as fast as she could, and it made him very sad.

Langer called Gino’s cell when they got in the car. ‘We’ve got something from the Schuler house.’

Chief Malcherson was standing with Langer and McLaren at the long table in the front of the Homicide room when Gino and Magozzi walked in. Gino was pleased as punch to see that he was now wearing his charcoal double-breasted suit and a flame-red tie.

‘Gee, Chief,’ he said happily. ‘You went home and changed into a murder suit. Cool.’

Malcherson looked at him. ‘I did not go home to change into a “murder suit.” I spilled coffee on the other one.’

Gino kept smiling, because that was a load of crap. Malcherson never spilled anything, ever. ‘You know, a lot of men couldn’t pull off that tie with that suit without looking like a drum major, but you nailed it.’

‘Thank you so much.’ Malcherson stepped away from the table to let Gino and Magozzi move closer. ‘Langer and McLaren filled me in on where you’re going with this. It looks like Langer found the confirmation you were looking for at the Ben Schuler house.’

Magozzi looked at the sixty identical photographs of Ben Schuler’s family, still in their frames, spread out on the table. ‘We saw those at the house; thought it was weird. Jimmy Grimm thought they might have been some kind of memorial for his family, because they died in the camps and he didn’t.’

Gino was frowning. ‘I don’t get how this is confirmation that Schuler and the rest of them were killing Nazis.’

Langer took a picture off the table and started dismantling the frame while he talked. ‘I thought it was weird, too, so I took down one of the frames and opened it, just because people hide things in pictures sometimes. This is the first one I opened.’ He pulled the picture free of the cardboard backing and turned it over to expose small, spidery writing on the back side. ‘I didn’t recognize the name, but I certainly recognized the date and the place.’

Magozzi squinted at the writing. ‘Milan, Italy, July 17, 1992.’ His eyes flew up to Langer’s. ‘Is that the date of the Milan Interpol murder?’

Langer nodded. ‘We’ve checked the backs of six photos besides that one so far, and they all have the same kind of notation: a name, a place, and a date. One match to the Interpol list, all the others were on the list Grace MacBride faxed over of the domestic trips Gilbert, Kleber, and Schuler took together. I’m guessing that when we call the locals in those cities and give them the date, they’ll have a murder that went down, probably an unsolved.’

Magozzi’s eyes swept over all the pictures, seeing a body behind each one. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered. ‘These pictures aren’t memorials. They’re trophies. One for every Nazi they killed. We’re looking at sixty bodies here.’

‘Sixty-one,’ Langer said. ‘He never had time to put one up for Arlen Fischer.’

Malcherson picked up one of the photos and looked down at the faces of people who had been dead for over half a century. ‘Not trophies, Detective Magozzi. They were offerings to his family,’ he said quietly. ‘A body a year.’

Gino sighed and shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘Man, I was blown away before, but this is mind-boggling. These people have been on a sixty-year murder spree.’ He glanced over at McLaren, who was dismantling the frames, removing the photos, and placing them on the table in what looked like chronological order. He hadn’t said anything since they came into the room, but he didn’t look so depressed anymore. Just focused and maybe a little angry, which was good. Depressed cops were pretty useless. ‘You find anything at Rose Kleber’s house, McLaren?’

‘Oh, yeah. About a thousand pictures of her grandkids, every single greeting card she ever got from anybody, you know, grandma stuff. Nothing like this, and no gun. A couple guys are still over there. I came back when Langer called.’

‘We picked up a couple of things at Grace’s, too,’ Magozzi said.

And then he laid Grace’s printout of the S.S. officers down on the table, showed them Arlen Fischer as a young man named Heinrich Verlag, and told them all about it.

Langer picked up the picture and looked closely. ‘Fischer was the prize catch for somebody – Morey or Ben Schuler, I suppose, since they were both at Auschwitz with this animal.’

‘Yeah,’ Gino said. ‘I don’t even want to know what he did to them to deserve the death he got.’

‘But the thing that puzzles me,’ Langer went on, ‘is that he was right under their noses for decades. Why did they wait so long to kill him?’

Magozzi shrugged. ‘Maybe they just found him. We still don’t know how they tracked these people down, but they obviously had an edge over Wiesenthal and the rest of the groups that were looking – Fischer’s been on the watch list since the fifties. Or maybe it was something as simple as serendipity. Fischer was something of a shut-in, remember; the only place he went regularly was a Lutheran church, and it’s not likely that Morey Gilbert or Ben Schuler would have run into him there over the years. But maybe he took a walk a few weeks ago, and one of them just happened to be driving by. We’ll probably never know.’

Gino nodded. ‘So Morey Gilbert and the rest of them go over to Fischer’s house Sunday night. They’ve got it all planned, what they’re going to do to him, right down to bringing along a gurney. But maybe Fischer fought back or tried to run away. Whatever happened, somebody panicked and let off a shot, and there’s Fischer bleeding to death before they can get him to the train tracks.’

‘So they grab the runner off the coffee table and make a tourniquet,’ said Langer.

‘Right. Then they take him to the tracks, do their thing, and a few hours later Gilbert’s dead. Next day Rose Kleber is killed, Schuler the next. I’m thinking maybe somebody close to Fischer saw what went down and went after them to even the score.’

McLaren shook his head. ‘Everything fits but the last part. Nobody was close to Fischer. No wife, no kids, no friends that we can find, and I sure can’t see the old housekeeper toddling after a bunch of killers for a little payback.’

‘Then we have to go back farther than Fischer,’ Magozzi said. ‘Could be someone’s been tailing them for a while – maybe a family member of one of the earlier victims – and took his shot when Morey came home late that night. We’ve got to start calling the cities listed on those pictures, see if we can match up murders to the dates, and then start looking hard at their families.’

They all moved in on the table and started helping McLaren disassemble the pictures. Gino was shaking his head while he worked. ‘Calling all these places, sweet-talking the locals, tracking down families . . . this could take forever.’

‘I know,’ Magozzi said. ‘Where the hell’s Peterson?’

‘Damnit,’ McLaren muttered, heading for the nearest desk and phone. ‘He went along to Rose Kleber’s house to help with the search. I’ll get him back in here.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Malcherson said quietly from the doorway, making McLaren jump. He’d forgotten the chief was there. ‘You need to get back to what you were doing.’

And that was the very best thing about Malcherson, Gino was thinking. He’d jump in and take care of the small stuff when things got heavy, because he trusted his detectives to do their jobs, and knew when to back away and let them get to it. He threw a little salute to the chief as he walked out.

Five minutes later they had all the pictures in chronological order, barely glancing at the cities, except when they rang a bell, like the ones on the Interpol list, and one just last year in Brainerd, Minnesota, which creeped Gino out because he went to Boy Scout camp there when he was a kid. Five minutes after that, Peterson hustled in, his pasty face flushed.

McLaren gaped at him. ‘How the hell did you get here so fast?’

‘Sixty miles an hour on the surface streets. I feel like I’m going to have a heart attack. Malcherson had me on the cell all the way, bringing me up to speed. Give me somebody to call.’

Magozzi handed him a photograph. ‘We’re starting with the most recent dates and going backwards. You know what to do?’

‘You bet. Call the locals, find a murder for our date, track the families.’

‘Right. But remember, the name on the photo probably won’t match the name of the victim. If these guys were Nazis, they were hiding.’

‘Got it.’ Peterson snatched the photo and headed for his desk.

‘Holy shit, Leo, take a gander at this one.’ Gino shoved a photograph under his nose. ‘1425 Locust Point, Minneapolis, fourteen April, 1994. You know who that is? That’s the plumber somebody turned into a sieve. The cold case I brought over to your place Sunday, remember?’

‘Valensky?’

‘Gotta be. The name’s different, but unless there was another murder at that address on that date and nobody told me, that’s our guy.’ He took a beat and looked at all the pictures. ‘I’ll bet we’re going to solve a lot of cold cases for a lot of departments before we’re finished with this mess.’

McLaren straightened from the table, his normally affable face furious. ‘Okay, that tears it. Goddamn that son of a bitch, that really pisses me off. The whole time Morey Gilbert’s convincing me and Langer he’s God in a pair of overalls, he’s out killing people in our city.’

‘He had reasons we’ll probably never understand, Johnny.’

McLaren looked at his partner as if he were out of his mind. ‘Our city, Langer. If anybody has a problem with people in our city, they come to us and we take care of it. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.’

Langer looked at the conviction in Johnny McLaren’s face, remembering when things had been that clear for him.
Murderers are bad, catching murderers is good.
So simple. So black and white. It was examining the gray areas that got you in trouble. At that moment he realized that of the two of them, McLaren was the better cop.

‘Let’s get moving,’ Magozzi said, grabbing the most recent pictures and passing them out. His phone was ringing by the time he got to his desk.

Dave from Ballistics had a reedy voice so distinctive you could recognize it immediately, and right now it sounded tight and strained. ‘I’m backed up to my balls here, Leo, but you and Gino need to know this right away.’