Off the Grid (13 page)

26

T
he first thing that hit you when you walked into City Hall in the morning was the smell of coffee. Gino stopped just inside the door and took a few deep breaths with his eyes closed. Magozzi frowned at him. “What the hell are you doing?”

Gino took another breath and opened his eyes. “Inhaling caffeine. I’m thinking it might be the only good experience I have today. Besides, I have just detected the very specific odor of one of those Starbucks white mocha things with extra espresso shots. Who the hell in this building has a salary that can afford that?”

“A better question is, how do you know about girlie Starbucks drinks? We’re men. We’re cops. We drink our coffee black.”

“Amen to that, but I’ve got a teenager in my house, and she brings that swill home all the time. On her dime, not mine, by the way. You know how girls used to wear perfume? I swear to God, the new perfume is what kind of coffee drink you have on your breath.”

Magozzi scrunched up his nose as he pondered coffee as a pheromone. His only youthful scent memories were all those great, sugary discount store scents his high school dates used to bathe themselves in. Social progress never took the path you’d imagined in your own youth.

The second thing about City Hall was that the place was always buzzing. This morning, it was more than just buzzing; it was like one of those monster wasps’ nests that suddenly appear beneath your garage eaves overnight. But the wasps swirling around the building this morning were mostly the white Anglo-Saxon types.

There were cops, reporters, cameramen and -women, brass from every department, and a lot of administrative suits you rarely saw, including the mayor and the head of MPD public relations. All of them were maintaining a brisk pace and harried expressions. The media furor after all the murders and the evacuation in Little Mogadishu showed no signs of letting up, and every politician in the state wanted to comment, just to get face time on television.

“Gonna be another tough morning,” Gino observed. “Let’s get the hell into our cubicles and stay there. Maybe we can solve some crime today.”

“Sounds good to me.” And that, in a nutshell, was normally the best thing about working Homicide—you were always heading toward a single, sharply defined goal: catch the killer. The Feds were handling the terrorist and kidnapping angles; all Gino and Magozzi had to do was find out who killed the terrorists and the kidnappers. Nothing muddled about that.

They made a pit stop at Tommy Espinoza’s office on the way to their own. He was the MPD’s resident IT geek—a third Swedish, a third Hispanic, and a third processing chip—and he handled all the computer forensics for the department. Occasionally, he would call Monkeewrench in for a consult, but after working with them for a couple years and benefiting from their tutelage, he was a technological force to be reckoned with in his own right.

He rarely left his office, and when he did, it was usually to poach free junk food from the vending machines, which he did by inserting a mysterious little card into the slot where the dollar bills were supposed to go.

He looked up when Magozzi and Gino knocked on the frame of his open door. “Come on in, guys.” He tossed them each a candy bar from his desktop stash, which he kept in a faded plastic Halloween pumpkin. “I’m guessing you could both use a sugar rush right about now. Man, you guys are getting slammed.”

Gino tore into his Almond Joy. “We’ve had better weeks.”

“Did you get anything from the kidnappers’ computer yet?” Magozzi asked.

Tommy nodded. “Everything’s in Arabic, and the translator is still working on it.”

“Thanks, Tommy. Keep us posted.”

When Magozzi and Gino got to the entry of Homicide, there was another new receptionist standing behind the glass window, looking them up and down like they were a couple of gun-toting reprobates trying to break in and blow the department to bits.

Gino blew out a sigh and put an elbow on the ledge. “Detectives Rolseth and Magozzi,” he told her. “We belong here. We’re the good guys.”

They’d had a slew of these temps in ever since Gloria had gone on leave to take a shot at law school. God, he missed her. Sassy and wicked-smart, she’d been a fixture in Homicide for as long as he could remember. He missed her savvy about office routine and her utter lack of anything resembling civility. The long string of temps had been mostly young girls who looked prepubescent, interning to get a star on their résumés that would put them on the fast track to the academy.

This one was different. She had short gray hair and wore a black dress with a white collar that crept up her neck to her chin, making her look a little like a dropout from the convent. She gave Gino one of those level, straight-on gazes that always made him nervous when a woman delivered it. “I’m going to need to see your identification.”

Exasperated, Gino opened his badge case and slapped it against the glass. “Ten years in this department, no one’s ever asked for my ID.”

“Then this should be a new and thrilling experience for you. Unfortunately, you don’t look very much like this photo. Have you put on a lot of weight recently?”

Gino glared at her. “Have you had a death wish recently?”

She gave him a smile that made her look a lot less like a nun. “I’m a friend of Gloria’s. She told me you respond well to verbal abuse.”

“Well, she was wrong, and you, my friend, have the potential to become a real pain in the ass.”

She looked at his ID once more, noting the name. “I had a dog named Gino once. We had to put him down.”

As she buzzed them through, Magozzi looked at Gino. “I think you won her over.”

By the time they got to their desks, Magozzi’s cell was ringing. He looked at the display, then cocked a curious brow at Gino. “Key West PD. Maybe they’ve got something for us on Smith.”

Magozzi listened for a few minutes, thanked whoever was on the other end, then pushed in the new number for Grace’s throwaway cell.

“What’s up, Leo?”

Magozzi held up one finger. “I have to call Grace. Listen in . . .”

Harley picked up on the first ring. “Hey, Magozzi.”

“Put Grace on, Harley.”

“She’s in the shower. Is this something I can handle?”

“Do you know who Don Kardon is, Harley?”

“Sure. John and Grace’s friend from the marina.”

“Well, we just got a callback from Key West. Kardon was murdered last night.”

Harley’s voice was normally big and boisterous, but now it sounded like it had been squeezed down into a whisper. “Oh, shit. How?”

“He took a lot of bullets. The cop who called me said there were three attackers. Kardon fought back and did some serious damage before they finally killed him. The perps left behind a lot of their own blood.”

Harley was silent for a moment. “Any chance this was a robbery, maybe something from his past come back to bite him? Grace said he did some time.”

Magozzi rubbed his eyes. “I don’t think so. Whoever it was tossed John’s boat. Every drawer upended, every closet trashed. They were looking for something and they didn’t care who knew it. Key West put out a sweep on every hospital and clinic in the state, but nothing popped. They’re kind of at a dead end down there. For all they know, the killers could have come in by boat and left the same way.”

Gino was listening intently to the conversation, rubbing his upper lip, remembering a scanty mustache he’d had a million years ago when men still wore baggy flowered shirts they never tucked in.

Harley let out a long sigh. “This isn’t good, Magozzi. Someone else—maybe a lot of someones—is still trying to hunt down John.”

Magozzi closed his eyes, then frowned. “What do you mean ‘a lot of someones’?”

“Write down these Web addresses and call them up. We just found out there’s a jihad out on John and it’s all over the Net.”

Gino’s mouth fell open and stayed that way the whole time he scribbled down the addresses Harley dictated.

Harley continued. “We’re burning up the computers, trying to find out how the hell John got on a jihad list, but it’s going to take time, and I’m not so sure finding the reason would do any good. You know how this works. Some radical imam puts a jihad out on the Web, and every homegrown crazy decides to make a name for himself by taking out the target.”

“Can you shut down the sites?”

“Roadrunner’s working on it.”

“You’re blowing us away, Harley. A jihad on John? Where the hell do you go with that? We’ve still got all our feelers out with the law enforcement Grace wanted us to contact, but Kardon’s murder was the only thing that came of that.”

Harley grunted. “Makes sense. The marina was the natural place for them to look. I guess the best we can do is hope that they don’t look any farther than that.”

Magozzi felt a prickle on the back of his neck. “What do you mean?”

“Hell, I don’t know. How serious is this jihad thing? Do these freelancers hunt you down like a dog, or do they just go after targets that happen to be in their general neck of the woods? Now, when the mob was doing big business, those guys dug deep and never gave up the chase when they wanted to off someone. Those are the kind of people that would tear your background apart and find everyone who ever knew you and poke pins into their eyes until they talked.”

“Nice visual, Harley.”

“Yeah, I’m just bouncing stuff off the wall, going for the dark side.”

“Let us know if there’s anything more we can do to help.”

“Thanks, buddy, but this is going to be mostly computer operations. Besides, you’ve done enough going through law enforcement for us, especially when you’ve got your hands full. Gotta tell you, every time I check the news, I see your pretty face. Take care out there, fellas. Sounds like it’s murder season.”

• • •

Magozzi had no clue
how long he and Gino sat shoulder to shoulder in front of his computer, jumping from site to site, staring at John Smith’s face in utter disbelief. Gino finally pushed back from the desk, shaking his head. “This has got to be a joke. A bad joke. I mean, what the fuck? How do you get a goddamned jihad put on your head? Was he drawing cartoons of Muhammad, or what?”

Magozzi moved his head back and forth slowly, feeling like he’d just stepped into a Salvador Dalí scape. “He had to have been into something more than just monitoring radical websites. And we better hope like hell that Monkeewrench can figure it out.”

Gino was frowning so hard, his forehead looked corrugated. “There’s something real jiggy going on, Leo. And I have a bad feeling that we’re in the middle of it and we don’t even know it.” He looked down at his desk calendar and ripped off yesterday’s page. “It’s October twenty-sixth, Leo. Five days to Halloween.”

27

G
race stood under the shower for a very long time, trying to comprehend a jihad on John, wondering if he’d figured it out on his own by now, and praying that he was all right. It seemed so preposterous, and yet it was reality, and the frustration of not being able to connect the dots was almost paralyzing.

She sighed, cranked off the water, and dressed in the familiar black armor of her past. After months in skimpy clothes, they felt heavy and oppressive, and the knee-high riding boots were stiff and unyielding. But she’d get used to them again.

The loft smelled like coffee and cinnamon—somebody had set out a big plate of caramel rolls. Charlie was asleep on the chair beside her desk, and Annie, Roadrunner, and Harley were all so focused on their monitors, it took them all a few moments to realize she was standing in the doorway. “Did anything pop while I was in the shower?”

They all looked up, their distress playing across their faces as bold as neon, and she felt a ball of dread clench her stomach. “What’s wrong?”

“Honey, Magozzi just called,” Annie said softly. “Don Kardon was killed last night. I’m so sorry.”

Grace looked at them for a long time. She’d only known the man for three months, and it wasn’t like they’d become fast friends, but they had developed a mutual respect. Don Kardon was a loner with a dark past, which was something Grace knew all about; and they’d instantly recognized themselves in each other. And now he was gone.

She excused herself quietly and her friends knew better than to follow. Grace always grieved alone.

• • •

For as long as
Roadrunner could remember, he’d always seen things a lot differently than other people. At the age of five, he’d picked up a smashed radio from a ditch, looked at the guts, and saw instantly how it could be fixed. The wires and circuit boards weren’t broken components to him, they were a unified, three-dimensional universe that talked to him through pictures in his mind. And that universe was much better than the one he’d been living in at the time—he’d finally found an escape from his reality right around the time he’d started kindergarten.

By the time he was ten, he was working at an electronics repair shop on the sly for pennies on the dollar, repairing everything from fancy toasters to computers, and eventually learning the labyrinthine processing of anything with a board or a chip. His gift had been forged by a freak of genetics, but his tightly honed skills had helped him parlay that into a genius for programming which had never failed him—until now.

He was staring at John Smith’s hard drive, which was a Byzantine mess of programming that had him baffled. And frustrated. It was the first time in his life he’d looked into a machine and hadn’t instinctively known how to fix it. “This is a disaster,” he muttered to himself.

On the other side of the room, Annie glanced up from the sheaf of papers she was poring through. “Something bothering you, sugar?”

Roadrunner threw up his hands in temporary defeat. “Smith’s computer. He tweaked the programming into knots and it’s not making any sense.”

“It’s not like you to run into a wall. What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been at this too long, but it looks like he was messing with the Monkeewrench software programming language. But I can’t find the command lines for it.”

That got Harley’s attention. He got up from his own desk and clomped over to Roadrunner’s station. Annie, never one to miss a party, got up and joined them, clickity-clacking across the floor on ruby red stilettos that were horrifyingly out of season, but were the last new pair she had in her closet at Harley’s.

“How did he mess with it?” Harley asked, squinting down at the screen.

Roadrunner hammered in a few commands on his keyboard and jabbed a finger at the monitor. “Check this out, this is the weird thing. I’m only reading a partial signature of our programming in his drive, but it’s so corrupt, I can’t tell what he was trying to do with it.”

Harley grunted. “Man, I hate amateurs.”