Live Bait (36 page)

Magozzi got busy pulling out his notebook and pen, keeping his face averted in case the surprise showed.
How the hell did Jack know about Brainerd?
He knew the answer before he asked the question, and it sickened him. Jack had been up there at the fishing lodge with his father and the others. Jack had been in on it.

He felt the tension coming off Gino, knew he was thinking the same thing, but they both kept their silence, waiting to hear it out loud.

The real story was almost worse.

It took Jack a long time to tell them about Morey, Rose, and Ben shooting the old man in the fishing lodge, about the shadow he’d seen in the loft that day, and finally about his own refusal to participate.

Magozzi and Gino stopped writing and looked up at Jack simultaneously.

‘What?’ Jack asked.

‘Nothing, Jack. Go on.’

He told them about the ride home that day, the fight with his father, and everything that came after. ‘But I never connected Brainerd with Pop’s death at all,’ he finished. ‘Not until yesterday when Ben was killed and I saw Rose Kleber’s picture in the paper – I never knew her name until then. That’s when I realized what was happening, that whoever had been up in that loft saw what we did, and they were taking us out, one by one.’

‘What
they
did, Jack,’ Gino corrected him. ‘Not you.’

‘Whatever. I’ve got blood on my hands any way you look at it. If I’d told you sooner, maybe you could have figured it out in time to save Marty.’

Magozzi gave him the truth. ‘Maybe. But maybe not. Jeff covered himself pretty well.’

He’d thrown him a little bone, but it would never be enough, and Magozzi couldn’t offer any more. Half of him wanted to wring Jack’s neck, because he had to believe that with a little more lead time they might have been able to save Marty – but the other half of him bled for the guy. What would it be like to have a father who tried to turn you into a killer, then disowned you when you refused?

Jack got up and poured himself a cup of coffee. ‘There’s something else. Pop said they’d been doing this for years, that they’d killed a lot of Nazis. He said he kept a list on the computer, but I couldn’t find anything. He could have erased it.’

‘We’ll have someone come over and pick up the computer, take a look at it just in case,’ Magozzi said.

Jack shrugged. ‘It might not even be true.’

‘I’m afraid it is true,’ Magozzi said. ‘We just put that together this afternoon. Ben Schuler kept records of the ones they’d killed on the backs of some pictures he had in his house.’

Lily straightened slightly in her chair. ‘How many?’

‘Over sixty so far.’

She closed her eyes.

‘You had no idea what Morey was doing all those years?’

She took off her thick glasses, opened her eyes, and looked at him. It was the first time that Magozzi had seen her eyes without the barrier of the glasses. They were beautiful, he thought, and tragic.

‘This is what I knew. He started talking about this thing right after the war. Other people, little groups, were hunting these men down, killing them, and he thought this was just. A noble thing. I told him if he ever left our house to kill another human being, not to come back, and he never talked about it again.’

‘He took trips without you at least twice a year,’ Gino reminded her. ‘You didn’t think that was strange?’

‘You’re such a suspicious person, Detective Rolseth. Your wife goes away for the weekend with friends, do you think, aha, she’s out killing people? Morey and Ben went fishing every now and then. Was that so hard to believe? So anyway, that’s all I knew until the night Morey was shot. I thought he was in the greenhouse, like every night. But then he woke me up at about midnight and said he’d killed the Animal.’

‘An animal?’ Gino asked.

‘
The
Animal. It’s what we called him. He was S.S. at Auschwitz.’

‘Heinrich Verlag,’ Magozzi said. ‘Also known as Arlen Fischer.’

Jack’s jaw dropped open. ‘Fischer? The man who was tied to the railroad tracks? Are you telling me
Pop
did that? And then he
told
you about it?’

Lily nodded. ‘Verlag, I knew. Verlag, I had seen in action. Sixty years, I wished for that man’s death. So Morey wakes me up like a proud cat bringing home a dead mouse, maybe thinking I wouldn’t mind that he had killed this one. All those years, and he never knew me.’

‘You should have told me, Ma.’

‘You think I wanted my son to know his father was a murderer?’

‘But I already knew that.’

Lily gave him a sad little smile. ‘Now you tell me.’

Magozzi laid down his pen and rubbed his eyes. It was almost too much information to take in, and almost none of it looked good for either Jack or Lily.

‘We’re going to have to write all this up, turn it in,’ Gino said, echoing his thoughts.

Jack smiled a little. ‘Don’t look so glum, Detective. You’ve been trying to get me in a cell for two days, and now you’ve got your wish. I witnessed a murder, I didn’t report it, and I’ll sign a confession. It’s about time somebody in this family started taking responsibility for what they’ve done.’

Lily patted his hand.

‘Well don’t get your hopes up for any luxury accommodations at Stillwater just yet. Lots of extenuating circumstances here. We don’t know where the county attorney will go with any of this.’

‘One more question, Jack,’ Magozzi said. ‘Marty wanted you to tell us something that would close the Eddie Starr case.’ He glanced at Lily, saw that the name hit her hard. ‘He knew that Morey killed him, right?’

Jack just stared at him for a minute.

‘It doesn’t matter now, Jack. We already had that anyway – the gun Morey and the others used on a lot of the victims matched the gun that killed Eddie Starr . . .’

‘Morey killed the man who killed Hannah?’ Lily whispered.

‘No.’ Jack said quietly. ‘Marty did. That’s what was killing him. That’s what he couldn’t live with.’

Magozzi and Gino looked at each other, then leaned back in their chairs, as if the effort of sitting upright was suddenly too difficult.

Magozzi closed his eyes and saw hatred and vengeance everywhere. Morey killing, Marty killing . . . and only Lily and Jack standing apart, standing alone against the violence that had destroyed their lives. He wondered if they realized how very much alike they were, if anyone could sift through the confusion of all their mistakes to see their essential goodness.

And then he remembered Marty’s words as he lay dying.

All this time, you were the only good guy, Jack. Better than any of us. You’re the hero.

Sometime during the night the storm had blown out of Minnesota and into Wisconsin, leaving muddy fields and shattered buildings and ruined lives in its wake. Nine tornadoes had touched down in the state, and for the time being the media was somberly preoccupied with photo-ops of the aftermath.

There had been brief coverage of the shooting at Uptown Nursery, but the press had been too focused on the storm story to do any serious digging yet. But soon, when the public was tired of seeing two-by-fours driven through tree trunks, upside-down trailers, and the flat remains of a pole building near Wilmer that had housed twenty thousand turkeys, the media would come clamoring after Homicide, looking for another ratings grabber. This was not a happy thought for Chief Malcherson as he strode down the hall toward the Homicide office. Then again, there were no happy thoughts in this building today.

Gloria was at her desk in the front, swathed in black, punishing all the mail. Marty Pullman had spent a lot of time in this office when Langer and McLaren were working Hannah’s murder, and Gloria had taken a shine to him. Partly because he had bowlegs and she’d never once met a bowlegged man she didn’t like; partly because he was always a gentleman in a big way, gave her that quiet kind of friendly respect you could never get enough of. But mostly because that man had been heartbroken over losing his wife and wasn’t ashamed to put it right out there. Any man who loved a woman that much deserved mourning.

She looked up when Malcherson stopped at her desk. ‘Did you get any sleep, Chief?’

‘A few hours, thank you. Who’s in?’

‘Peterson took the call on that drunken fool they pulled out of the Mississippi this morning. The rest are here. Magozzi and Rolseth came back in about a half hour ago, looking like somebody’d dragged them through a knothole backwards. If you want my opinion, and I know you do, I think you ought to send them back home.’

‘I’ll give it my best effort, Gloria.’

Malcherson walked to the back of the room, where Langer and McLaren worked at their desks on the left, Magozzi and Gino on the right. He pulled a chair into the aisle between them and sat down, positioning a pristine legal tablet on his knees. ‘Gentlemen, we need to go over some things.’

Langer and McLaren looked all right – as far as he knew, they’d finished their reports on the search of Jeff Montgomery’s apartment and gone home before midnight – but Magozzi and Rolseth had still been in the office when he’d left at 3
A
.
M
. Magozzi looked gaunt and strained; Gino looked like he was wearing little bags of melting Jell-O under his eyes, but the real measure of his exhaustion was that he hadn’t said a thing about Malcherson’s suit.

‘You’ve all done some amazing work on these cases, Detectives. Unless I misread your reports, we cleared four homicides last night.’

‘The hard way,’ Magozzi said bitterly.

‘You saved Jack Gilbert’s life,’ Malcherson reminded him.

‘But we lost Marty Pullman. We were ten seconds too late.’

‘Every homicide committed in this city means we were ten seconds too late to save somebody, Detective Magozzi. We do what we can.’ He pulled his Mont Blanc from his pocket and looked at Langer and McLaren. ‘Do we have a final report on the search of Thomas Haczynski’s apartment yet?’

‘It’s coming, but the preliminary pretty much tells the story.’ McLaren flipped open a little ragged notebook with doodles all over the cover. ‘The kid had a .22 under his mattress that Ballistics confirmed early this morning. Same gun that shot Morey Gilbert. And the nine he used on Marty killed Rose Kleber and Ben Schuler. Plus we got a journal that lays out what he was doing and why, right up to the last entry, just before he went to the nursery last night to kill Jack. It’s grim reading, I’ll tell you. Gives me the creeps. He’d been planning this for over a year, down to the last detail, even set up that cell phone scam to make it look like he was living in Germany.’

Malcherson looked up from his tablet. ‘Explain.’

‘We just told Gino and Magozzi about that,’ Langer said. ‘Montgomery had one of those expensive hybrid phones in his apartment – the kind that works here and in Europe. It was pretty simple, really. All he had to do was set up a German account, complete with German telephone number, and no read-back, including ours, could ever tell the difference. He could take calls or call out from anywhere in the world, and it would still look like he was in Germany.’

‘Little bastard,’ Gino grumbled, still seething about being fooled. ‘Bawling one minute, talking German the next, pretending to be his own uncle.’

Malcherson sighed. ‘So essentially, Magozzi’s and Rolseth’s cases are closed.’

‘I’d say so,’ Langer agreed. ‘The Arlen Fischer case is something else. We know Morey Gilbert and his crew killed him, but it’s all circumstantial. A bunch of plane tickets and a lot of conjecture. We can’t actually put a gun in the hand of any of them for even one of the sixty-odd murders we know they committed, let alone Arlen Fischer. And as for Morey’s confession to Lily, a second-year law student could tear her to shreds. She’s old, she was wakened out of a sound sleep, she could have been dreaming . . . like that.’

‘Same thing with Jack’s story about what happened in Brainerd,’ Gino said. ‘From Jimmy Carter, maybe. From a drunken P.I. attorney who walks around downtown Wayzata in his bathrobe – I don’t think so.’

‘So what’s the problem?’ McLaren asked. ‘It’s not like we’re going to prosecute these people. They’re dead.’

‘If we try to close Arlen Fischer based on our conclusions without adequate proof, we
are
prosecuting these people, without a trial,’ Malcherson said. ‘And I, for one, do not want to try to convince the public to take our word for it that three sweet, elderly pillars of the community, who suffered and survived the horrors of concentration camps only to be murdered in our city, were in fact, a gang of serial killers.’

McLaren threw up his hands. ‘So don’t close the case. Keep it open forever.’

‘That won’t work, either,’ Langer said. ‘Jeff Montgomery’s journal is public information the minute we close the Gilbert, Kleber, and Schuler murders, and that journal details those three murdering his father in Brainerd. Then everything unravels, and we take the heat for
not
following through.’

Malcherson touched a finger to one cottonball eyebrow. ‘The press is going to have a field day with this. This is the kind of story that journalists dream about. Nazis hiding in plain view, Jewish vigilante death squads . . . the whole city is going to be taking sides over this one on the airwaves for a long time, and we’re going to be right in the middle. And that’s just what happens locally. When the story hits the wires, this department is going to be caught up in a global media firestorm.’

McLaren slid down so far in his chair his head almost disappeared behind his desk. ‘So we’re screwed if we try to close Arlen Fischer, screwed if we don’t.’

‘That appears to be the case, Detective.’

‘Well, great. Langer, give the chief your gun. He can shoot us all, then take his own life.’

‘I might have another option.’ Malcherson had that flinty look in his eyes that meant he might be thinking about smiling in the next six months or so. ‘Technically, when we turn a case over to the FBI, it’s officially closed in our department. Any and all queries would have to be referred to Special Agent in Charge Paul Shafer. We would no longer be in a position to discuss the case with anyone. Not law enforcement, not Interpol, and certainly not the media. Our hands would be tied, gentlemen.’