Off the Grid (14 page)

28

M
agozzi woke up Thursday morning to the raucous voices of the irreverent hosts of a morning talk show coming from his clock radio. He hated the station, but used it as his alarm, because there was no way you could sleep through the puerile noise of two loudmouths spouting off-color jokes at that hour. He fumbled for the off button and noticed the digital readout:
6:00 A.M. OCTOBER 27TH
.

Shit. Four days to Halloween. Four days to either a terrorist attack or a terrorist prom, or maybe four days to nothing. He liked the last option and, for the time being, forced the first option to the back of his mind.

He dragged himself out of bed and went to the nearest window—it was a little OCD thing that seeped into your psyche when you lived in Minnesota, especially this time of year. Autumn was dicey—you could wake up to unseasonable heat or unseasonable cold—actually, the meteorologists labeled all conditions unseasonable, as if they had no right to be there at that particular time. Still, you had to know how to dress.

He pulled apart the slats of the bargain window blinds he’d picked up at some home improvement store, and looked out onto his yard. The sun was shining, but the sky was that scary dark blue that looked like a theater curtain hiding winter behind it. A few days ago it had been blistering hot; this morning there was an icy glaze coating his unraked leaves. That was one of the things he hated about Minnesota—there were no segues between seasons.

He turned on the TV and listened to the weather girl with the really big head tell him the day would be pleasant and warm unless the cold front en route from Canada moved down faster than expected, in which case, he could anticipate freezing his balls off. Life shouldn’t be this uncertain.

He was having his first cup of caffeine out on the porch, watching his breath make frosty air bubbles, when Gino pulled into the drive. He’d barely buckled his seat belt before Gino started to rant.

“This is just bullshit, Leo, you know that? I had to scrape my windshield this morning. Nobody told me Armageddon on Ice was coming to a theater near me, and I’ve got a four-year-old bawling into his board shorts right now because he wanted to be a surfer dude for Halloween.”

“The Accident wants to be a surfer dude? How is that even on his radar?”

Gino grunted. “Nice, calm shows with pretty locations and big waves are Valium to kids. I never figured he’d actually pick up on the content, and now he’s obsessed with the
Endless Summer
documentary.”

“Well, at least there’s no violence,” Magozzi offered.

“Yeah, there is that. The downside is he might become inspired to live in our basement until he’s fifty. We’re getting ballistics on the Hardy scene this morning, right?”

“That was the promise.”

“Good. Then we can seal that case, file our report, and go on a cruise.”

“You hate boats.”

“Yeah, but I like open bars, and I’m going to need one to get the taste of this week out of my mouth.”

Compared to yesterday’s melee, City Hall was damn near deserted. All the media vultures had apparently flown off to find the next tragedy. And where cameras went, the pandering politicians followed. The relative quiet was nice, but a little creepy at the same time, like they were the last survivors after the pandemic.

Unfortunately, the temporary receptionist was behind the glass in the Homicide farm, standing guard like a Doberman. She gave Magozzi a tiny smile, then glared at Gino. “May I see some identification, please?”

Gino made a face. “Was that supposed to be a joke?”

“Yes.” She buzzed them in.

McLaren was cleaning off his desk, a truly disturbing event since it had never happened before. He had a little color in his face, which meant he’d either caught up on his sleep or had gone on a bender.

Gino saw a missed patch of red whiskers on his left cheek and voted for the latter. He held a wastebasket up to the edge of his desk and swept a stack of clutter into it. “No one killed anybody so far this morning. Chief Malcherson said I could help you two out until something new comes in. You got anything for me?”

Magozzi gathered his copies of the case files and put them on the newly clean spot on McLaren’s desk. “Here. We’ve got nothing on who murdered the two kidnappers at the house where the girls were found. Maybe you can see something in the reports we missed.”

“And the three bodies at the explosives house?”

“We’ll probably be able to close that one when the ballistics report comes in. They said they’d call today.” Magozzi went to his desk. Gino sat opposite him at his own desk and started abusing a Snickers bar. He flipped it end to end, cracking the chocolate coating and smooshing the caramel. There was no greater demonstration of his distress than assault on a food product. “You’re destroying a candy bar. That’s not like you.”

“Yeah, I know. I actually made the mistake of reading the paper this morning. They had a big feature on Joe Hardy that put me in the dumps. The guy serves three tours for his country, comes back with more medals than you can shake a stick at, fights cancer for over a year, and gets shot to pieces by a couple terrorists in his own city. It just isn’t fair.”

Magozzi didn’t know what to say. Fortunately, his direct office line buzzed, saving him from further, depressing conversation about good men dying. “Detective Magozzi,” he answered.

“Hey, Magozzi, this is Dave from Ballistics.”

Magozzi pushed the speaker button. “Go ahead, Dave. Gino and McLaren are listening in.”

“Hi, McLaren. Hey, Gino, how’d you do with the garage sale last weekend?”

Gino seemed happy for the distraction. “Pretty great. How’s that beanbag chair I fleeced you for working out?”

Dave snorted. “Best fifty cents I ever spent. Most comfortable chair in the house. Of course, the wife banished it to the basement, but that’s okay by me—I’ve got my flat screen down there.”

Magozzi cocked a brow. He hadn’t figured Dave for a savvy shopper. “Got anything for us on the Hardy case?”

An unexpectedly morose sigh came over the speaker loud and clear. “More than you bargained for, probably.”

Gino frowned his puzzlement at the phone. “What’s going on?”

“Well, I’ve got all kinds of weird for you, but good news first—your case is solved—your three vics killed each other. Joe Hardy’s gun took out the two Somalis, and Hardy took his bullets from theirs. Picture-perfect match all around.”

“Hallelujah,” Gino said. “Just like we figured.”

“But what you probably didn’t figure on was Joe Hardy, or at least his gun, has been busy.”

Magozzi and Gino shared a glance. “What do you mean?”

“When I finally got around to logging the guns and the tool-mark results into all the ballistics registries, I got a NIBIN hit.”

NIBIN stood for National Integrated Ballistic Identification Network—a stroke of sheer genius that cataloged ballistics information from crimes all across the country for cross-matching. Monkeewrench hadn’t developed the original software, but they contributed updates and improvements pro bono on a regular basis, Magozzi knew.

“On
Hardy’s
gun?” Gino asked incredulously.

“Yeah. Same gun killed those two at the house where you found the kidnapped girls.”

McLaren looked up from his reading, finally interested.

“What?”

“I told you I had all kinds of weird for you.”

Gino shook his head in denial. “No way. There’s gotta be a mistake.”

“Look, I didn’t want to believe it either. Hell, I’ve been reading the paper and watching the news just like everybody else, and I know about Joe Hardy and his story. The guy was a bona fide hero.” Dave paused and sighed. “Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings.”

“Well, this just bites,” Gino mumbled once they’d signed off. “And I have to tell you, ballistics matches or not, there’s something seriously wrong with this scenario. Joe Hardy was a soldier, but he wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. It’s one thing to do a nasty job in a theater of war, but he was back at home. Decommissioned.
Dying of cancer.
And taking care of everybody around him. There are more angles to this, there has to be.”

Magozzi leaned back in his chair and found a cobweb on the ceiling to ponder. “When you come right down to it, we don’t really know who Joe Hardy was.”

Johnny spun his chair to face them, a folder open on his lap. He was wearing a yellow-and-green-plaid jacket that looked like a leprechaun had exploded. “Well, we know he was a Class A sharpshooter in Special Ops and that most of his service record is redacted. I haven’t seen this much black on a page since Billy Douglas spilled a bottle of India ink on my Santa Claus drawing in the third grade. The military doesn’t block this shit out because the soldier was sitting down staring at his belly button. I’m guessing our Joe Hardy was one badass.”

Gino scowled. “Joe Hardy was a hero.”

“That’s what heroes are in wartime, my man. Badasses.”

29

I
t took Gino almost a full minute to tunnel through his brain and find a way to negate McLaren’s image of Joe Hardy as some kind of badass. He used the time wisely, tearing into the wrapper of his mangled Snickers bar and taking a ferocious bite, channeling his distress by enthusiastic mastication.

“Okay. I think I’ve got a new theory,” he said, spraying pieces of broken chocolate onto his desk blotter with abandon. “The gun and the bullets match, that I believe. But like Dave said, Joe’s
gun
was busy, and without any witnesses, there’s no way to prove he was actually the shooter at the kidnappers’ house. I mean, seriously, the guy was a dead man walking. I just can’t believe he’d suddenly go out on a whack fest to fill up all the spare time he must have had between all his chemo appointments.”

Magozzi grunted. “You mean like the mysterious one-armed man in
The Fugitive
?”

“Yeah, nobody believed in the one-armed man, but in the end, there was one.”

“It was a movie, Gino.”

“So. Doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.”

McLaren put his elbow on his desk and his chin in his hand. He loved watching these two guys bat it back and forth. It was like having a front-row seat at Wimbledon.

“That gun has been registered in Joe’s name for six years,” Magozzi said. “Never reported stolen. You think Beth did it, or what?”

“Of course not.”

“So then what? He loaned out his gun to a friend for target practice, and the friend turns out to be a homicidal maniac?”

Gino screwed up his mouth sourly. “We can’t rule out a second shooter.”

“Look at the timeline, Gino. It’s tight. The first two murders happened late Sunday morning according to the ME. Joe went up to Elbow Lake that afternoon. Could the imaginary homicidal friend who theoretically had Joe’s gun on loan return it to him before he made the drive up north? Sure. Kill two people, let the gun cool off, give it a good cleaning, and return it by lunchtime. But is it likely?”

Gino put his head in his hands. “No. Jesus. Okay. Let’s just say Joe was the shooter. What the hell was his motive?”

Magozzi gnawed at his lower lip, an annoying habit that he’d long ago come to associate with clear thinking. “Joe Hardy did three tours in a couple seriously nasty wars. He saw horrible things, lost men in horrible ways. That would mess with anybody’s mind, so let’s just say it messed with his. He comes home, finds out he’s dying of cancer, and gets angry. Plus, he’s doing his chemo in a neighborhood filled with people who look like the bad guys. The war followed him home and something snaps, simple as that.”

Since the candy bar was gone, Gino busied himself by dismantling a perfectly innocent pen. “Doesn’t track. We’ve been fighting in the Middle East for what, a hundred million years? A lot of vets come home totally messed up, and who can blame them? Every now and then, and I’m talking rare here, you hear on the news that one of them totally loses it and maybe you’ve got a domestic, maybe you’ve got a bar fight, but mostly those poor saps who can’t deal end up offing themselves. They don’t get trigger-happy with people who look like their old enemies, and they sure as hell don’t calculate hits like contract killers. You’re jumping right on the crazy train, throwing Joe under the bus, and we don’t even know if he had that gun the whole time.”

Magozzi grabbed three aspirin from the bottle in his desk drawer and washed them down with cold coffee. “You’re right. We’ve got to talk to Beth again.”

“Oh, super. You want to go now? ‘Oh, hey, Beth, wow, your mascara held up really well through all this mourning. I know Joe’s only been cold for a couple days, but we think he was a psycho killer. We’d be so stoked if you could alibi him, so we can all feel better about ourselves.’” Gino sagged a little in his chair and chucked pieces of pen into his desk drawer.

Magozzi leaned back and studied Gino. This was messing with him big-time. Gino had found a hero in Joe Hardy and was reluctant to let go, maybe because he so desperately wanted to believe heroes existed. The superhero comic book influence. Amazing how pulp fiction was totally relevant most of the time. It just left out the little detail about heroes being flawed like everybody else. “Call her, Gino. Your track record’s a hell of a lot better than mine when it comes to communicating with women. Put it on speaker. I’ll jump in if I need to.”

Beth answered on the third ring and they heard the faint hum of background noise—either the TV or a distant roomful of mourners, it was hard to tell which. “Mrs. Hardy. This is Detectives Rolseth and Magozzi calling. We’re really sorry to bother you, but something has come up in our investigation of your husband’s murder that simply can’t wait.”

“It’s all right, Detectives. I appreciate your attention to the case.”

“Are there people with you?”

“Yes. Family, friends, there are a lot of people here.”

“That’s good to know. We won’t keep you. All we really need to ask is if you have any knowledge about the location of Joe’s sidearm over the few days before his death. Particularly on the day he headed up north to hunt with his friends.”

Beth hesitated. She was no fool. She knew there was something behind the question. “Joe never let that gun out of his sight. He carried whenever he went out, even to the hospital. He took it out of the gun safe Sunday morning before he went to chemo, and when he came home, he packed it in his duffel before he left for Elbow Lake.”

Gino raised his brows at Magozzi. “Joe had chemo on Sunday?”

“Well, not exactly. He went to his appointment, but he never actually had the treatment.” There was a long, sad pause. “It wasn’t working. The doctor said there was no point.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hardy. So Joe didn’t loan his gun to anyone?”

“Of course not. Joe would never do that.”

Magozzi and Gino shared a gloomy look as the truth about Joe Hardy sank in—he was the shooter at both houses. The second may have been self-defense, but the first was premeditated.

A hint of trepidation crept into Beth’s tone. “Why are you asking about Joe’s gun?”

Gino held up his hands and volleyed the conversation to Magozzi. He didn’t want to go any further with this.

“Detective Magozzi here, Mrs. Hardy. We just needed to confirm the location of that weapon for our investigation.”

Over the speaker, Magozzi and Gino heard a different woman’s voice in the background. “Beth? Are you all right? Sit down, dear.”

“I’m fine, Mother. I’ll just be a minute. Detectives?”

Magozzi said, “We’re still here, Mrs. Hardy. We’ll let you go now.”

“No. You’re trying to protect me from something. I don’t know what. Joe always did that, too. But this is the way it is. You watch someone you love go off to war three times, you’re a lot stronger than anyone gives you credit for. What’s this all about, Detectives?”

“For now, we’re just tying up loose ends so we can close the case. And as soon as we do, we’ll be sure to call you.” Magozzi’s mind was racing now, tripping over mental hurdles as he considered how much further to push. “Uh . . . there is one last thing, ma’am, if you don’t mind?”

“Go ahead.”

“Can you tell us if Joe had any problems with PTSD when he came back from his tours? Or a particular mistrust or dislike for men of Middle Eastern descent?”

Gino’s shoulders rolled forward in a cringe as he pinched his eyes shut.

“Hardly,” Beth answered without hesitation.

“So Joe didn’t harbor any blanket resentment?”

Beth breathed a soft sigh that was impossible to interpret. “Joe hated criminals, Detective, whatever their nationality. And he always knew the difference.”

“I think you just tied up all your loose ends, guys,” McLaren said after they hung up.

Gino had his head in his hands. “Yeah. Closed cases, happy ending all around. Now all we have to do is figure out how to tell Beth her dead hero husband went off the rails and started murdering people.”

“Maybe he had a reason.”

Gino looked up hopefully. “Like what?”

McLaren shrugged. “Well, it wasn’t like he was going door to door, plugging everybody. Take the first house where you found the girls. Those guys kidnapped five girls and murdered one of them. And God knows what those assholes in the second house were planning to do with all those explosives. Those guys were terrorists. And the kidnapped girls were in the first house. Maybe somebody was feeding Hardy information on bad guys in the ’hood—you know, like a neighborhood watch kind of thing—and he decided to take care of business himself instead of passing on the information to law enforcement. He was dying anyhow. Two more hero trips on the way out isn’t such a bad way to go if you’re a soldier.”

Magozzi thought that was a pretty ridiculous theory, unless you thought about it too long, and then it started to make a weird kind of sense.