Off the Grid (9 page)

16

I
n any other part of the city, you start stringing yellow police tape and the neighbors come out of the woodwork, camera phones held high to catch the action. But not in Little Mogadishu. Maybe the residents here were used to seeing three dead bodies in a front yard, or maybe they had a little more respect than your average, camera-toting suburbanite. At any rate, by the time Gino and Magozzi and the first responders came out of the house, the street was virtually deserted. The women wearing abayas had skittered back to their hidey-holes and blinds were drawn over every window.

Gino looked around, puzzled. “Where did everybody go?”

One of the officers made a face. “They’re back in their houses with their doors locked, and you better believe they won’t open them again until we’re out of here. We got lucky catching those few gals in the black shrouds on the street.”

“Abayas,” Magozzi said.

“Huh?”

“That’s what you call their outfits.”

“Oh. Whatever. This is a real tight, closed community. Nobody here trusts the cops. You got to remember, a lot of these people came from countries where anybody in a uniform could chop their head off just for looking at them.”

A blue sedan snugged up to the curb and a tall man in a well-cut suit stepped out, looked around, then headed toward them. He looked FBI, but the suit sure didn’t. No off-the-rack rumples for this guy. He also had an impressive bristle of blond hair and a tanned face with some age on it, but not much. He couldn’t have been more than thirty.

The man stopped a few feet away and cocked his head. “Detectives?”

Magozzi nodded. “Yes. Leo Magozzi and my partner, Gino Rolseth.”

He offered a hand. “Special Agent Dahl. I head the Bureau’s anti-terror task force here. Thank you for the prompt call. I assume you called Hazmat.”

“They’re en route. So’s the Emergency Response Team.”

“Good. I’m not going to be able to do a walk-through until they clear the scene, but you’ve been in there, so tell me exactly what kind of ordnance you saw in that back room.”

Gino’s tone wasn’t exactly hostile, but it was close. “What we saw was a buttload of weapons and explosives and RPGs and what I want to know is how they got here without you people knowing about it. I thought the Feds were supposed to be on the lookout for losers like that.” He jerked a thumb at the two bodies closest to the house.

Dahl met Gino’s eyes head-on, which was pretty impressive, like facing down a bulldog. “For your information, Detective, we’ve had these two on our radar for almost a month, ever since we received an anonymous tip on this address via an e-mail we couldn’t trace.”

“Well, your radar sucks.”

Dahl sighed and glanced at Magozzi. “Is he always like this?”

“Pretty much. What did the tip say?”

“All it said was: ‘Terror chatter on computer with al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab operatives,’ and then the address. So we put the house on twenty-four/seven surveillance for three weeks. That’s about our limit for unsubstantiated tips. These two were not on the national watch list. They were students at the university on legitimate visas. They went to campus every morning, came back every night. Nothing remotely untoward, nothing to justify a subpoena. So we terminated twenty-four/seven and put them on our local watch list. We still had eyes on them, but not around the clock.”

Gino folded his lips together and shook his head. “Well, when your eyes weren’t on them, these guys stockpiled an armory and I’m guessing they weren’t getting RPGs through the U.S. mail. There had to be some big trucks going in and out and you guys missed it. Nice going.”

Dahl straightened his shoulders and took such a deep breath that his nostrils compressed. “Listen, Detective, we have about fifty houses in this neighborhood alone on our local watch list. We’ve been watching some of them for five years, so we’re spread a little thin. Besides, they could have accumulated whatever is in that room long before we got the tip.”

Gino tried to backtrack without backing down. “Okay, I’ll give you that,” he grumbled.

Dahl glanced over at the house. “Is there a computer in there?”

Magozzi nodded. “A computer and a lot of paperwork. Your translators are going to be working around the clock. But look at the bright side—our homicides are solved and they gave you free entry, so you don’t need a subpoena. But there’s something else in there that caught our eye. Yesterday, we covered the homicides of the two Somali men who had the four Native American girls locked up in their house.”

Dahl nodded. “I saw the coverage. That was a nice catch.”

“It was pure luck. If those two hadn’t been killed, we never would have found the girls. But in that house we also noticed a calendar with October thirty-first circled. We saw the same thing inside this house. And my first creepy thought was, gee, four Somalis, all dirtbags, with the same date front and center? What if something’s going down on Halloween?”

“I’ll look into it. Can you send me copies of your reports?”

Gino snorted. “No problem. We happen to believe in intra-agency cooperation.”

Dahl’s mouth twitched in a faint smile. “So do I. I’ve never been a big fan of turf wars between agencies.”

Wow, Magozzi thought. An up-front Fed who wasn’t marking territory. Maybe this was a whole new breed of agent he was too old to know about until now.

Within fifteen minutes the number of vehicles on the street had tripled. Hazmat was there; so was Homeland Security, the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the ERT boys, and maybe the Future Farmers of America, for all Magozzi knew. Young men and women in Medical Examiner windbreakers worked the bodies with Crime Scene techs, oblivious to the chaos around them.

Jimmy Grimm was there, trying to direct the inexperienced in the proper management of a homicide scene, but if the team he had at Aimee’s murder site was the B team, these baby faces had to be even deeper into the alphabet. Every department was getting spread too thin these days. Jimmy looked seriously frustrated; the youngsters under him kept glancing worriedly at the Hazmat truck.

Hazmat went in first—dangerous material on-site was the one and only condition that put evidence at a homicide scene in second place. Magozzi felt a little sorry for the Hazmat boys. Mostly they handled suspicious packages and vehicles. It wasn’t often they had to walk past fresh kills on their way to work. Magozzi hoped they were all practiced at holding down their cookies. Throwing up in one of those sealed helmets would be a bitch.

Magozzi’s, Gino’s, and Dahl’s heads swiveled at the same time. They’d all been on potential hazard sites enough times to know that when a guy jumped out of the Hazmat command truck and started running full bore toward the cops controlling the scene, something bad was coming down.

“You know him?” Dahl asked.

Magozzi nodded. “You bet. That’s Barney Wollmeyer, one of the best we’ve got. What he says, we do.”

Wollmeyer stopped in front of Magozzi, kept his headphones on, but tipped his microphone away from his mouth. “The boys inside say evacuate four city blocks ASAP. They’re not moving any of the stuff in there until it’s clear. They found detonators connected to some real bad chemicals. No way to know if they’re activated.”

Magozzi was running toward the sergeant on scene before Wollmeyer stopped talking. “Clear ’em out, Sergeant. Four city blocks in no time.”

The sergeant’s brow furrowed. “What’s in that house?”

“Explosives, just for starters.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I’m not.”

“We’re going to need a hell of a lot more translators to clear four city blocks.”

Magozzi blew out a nervous breath. “They work on call. It’ll take a while to get them here. In the meantime, clear these houses. I don’t care how you do it. Hazmat is scared.”

While Magozzi was talking to the sergeant, Gino made a beeline for Jimmy Grimm. “Load these bodies up, Jimmy. Get them out of here before you don’t have any bodies left to transport.”

“We’re not finished with the in situ.”

“Fuck the in situ. We’re evacuating. There’s some bad shit in that house.”

As everyone scrambled to clear the bodies from the scene, Magozzi and Gino rejoined Agent Dahl at the curb. He was watching the sudden activity as people loaded the dead into body bags and hand-carried them to the van. No time for gurneys; no time for anything.

Gino glanced down at the pathetic remains of Joe Hardy being shoved unceremoniously into a bag by panicked techs, then looked away.

Evacuations were usually fast and very orderly—you tell any Minnesotan there’s a natural gas leak or a creep with a gun in the neighborhood, they walked right out of their houses with kids in tow, pets under their arms, and did exactly what they were told. This one wasn’t much different after the sergeant figured out how to communicate without a translator. He and the troops immediately started running from house to house, waving their arms and shouting “BOOM!,” frantically gesturing the evacuees to follow the pied piper cop trotting toward Franklin Avenue five blocks away.

Magozzi watched a parade of women—some of them in Western garb, some in traditional Muslim clothing, all moving quickly but calmly to follow the officer leading them to safety. They hurried their children along or carried them, like any mothers of any culture, in spite of any mistrust they may have had of authority, and something about that made Magozzi sad.

He listened to the cacophonous chatter of those who probably understood a bit of English explaining the emergency to those who didn’t, and wondered what they were thinking. Were the strangers in uniforms leading them to safety or into danger? It must have been an agonizing doubt, until one of the men in blue scooped up a tired child next to a tired mother and held him close as he trotted forward.

In that moment, Magozzi loved his city, his brothers on the force, and his country. That was the story here, he thought as he watched the media film the fleeing caravan.

But that wasn’t the video that made YouTube and Facebook and most of the media almost instantaneously. The video that went viral showed four women in abayas running helter-skelter down the street screaming while a cop tried to chase them down and point them in the right direction.

After the human traffic in the street had thinned, all the official vehicles burned a little rubber leaving the four-block zone. Only the Hazmat van was left.

Magozzi weaved the Cadillac around the hastily erected road barriers and headed for the freeway. They passed the big, lumbering Hazmat containment truck coming in as they went out. “Hazmat is going to be in there for hours, probably all night.” He glanced over at Gino. “You know what that means.”

Gino pulled the seat belt away from his belly and just hung on to it to keep his hands still. “Yeah. I know. Now, after everything else that’s gone down today, we have to tell some poor woman her husband is dead.”

17

B
eth Hardy was in her kitchen, weeping over a burned chicken, which was absolutely ridiculous. She’d lived through Joe’s three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and then she’d lived through the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and his death sentence and not once had she cried. She’d sucked it up, kept on a happy face, and never once given in to the emotions that were eating her from the inside out. And now a stupid burned chicken had reduced her to tears. It felt like she would never be able to stop crying. But of course she would.

She jumped when she heard car doors slamming. Oh God. For all the years Joe was overseas, the sound of a car pulling up to the front of the house terrified her. It was so unreasonable—friends, family, the mailman—everyone came in cars—but that didn’t stop the fear. She’d been waiting for the bad car, waiting for two Marines in full dress to come up her walk and tell her Joe was dead. Even though he wasn’t overseas anymore, old fears, like old habits, died hard. She took a breath to calm herself, wiped away her tears, and walked to the front door.

• • •

The Hardy residence
was a judiciously tended, two-story stucco in the southwestern part of the city, just off Minnehaha Creek. Magozzi pulled the Cadillac up to the curb. Driveways were for family and friends and people who were invited and welcome, and he and Gino certainly didn’t fit into any of those categories.

Magozzi looked over the lawn cropped close for winter, the neatly trimmed shrubs, flower beds still blooming despite the lateness of the season. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to keep up the place, to keep it looking fine and loved, and it sure as hell wasn’t the poor emaciated guy they’d found on that scruffy, untended Little Mogadishu curb. No way he would have had the strength.

“No leaves on this lawn, Leo.”

“Yeah.”

“Somebody in this house was watching their world fall apart, and they still raked the lawn.”

“Gino, you’re killing me.”

“Sorry. I hate notifications.”

Magozzi straightened his own tie. “You ready?”

“No.”

“Let’s go.”

They walked slowly up the straight, carefully edged walk to a porch with a white railing. Potted flowers, some purple stuff, corn shocks, and pumpkins adorned both sides of the front steps. “Nice place,” Gino murmured. “Really nice.”

Lately he’d been obsessed with landscaping and seasonal decorations. Where that had come from, Magozzi had no clue. Probably from watching the same evil home and garden channel that marginalized people who didn’t rake.

“It reminds me of my grandma’s house,” Magozzi said. “She had stacks of journals where she kept records on how she decorated for this or that holiday, so she never did the same thing twice.”

“No kidding? Hell, my grandma threw a pumpkin on the porch for Halloween and a plastic Santa in the yard for Christmas and called it a day. Both of them usually stuck around until spring.”

They’d reached the front door by then and put on their game faces, the nervous distraction of family memories on hold.

The lock clicked immediately and the door swung open. She wasn’t as young as she was in the wallet photo, and not nearly as fresh-faced. She had short blond hair and blue eyes still puffy from crying, or maybe lack of sleep. She looked puzzled and slightly alarmed to see two strangers in suits on her front stoop.

Gino and Magozzi showed her their shields. “Good morning, ma’am. I’m Detective Magozzi, and this is Detective Rolseth. Are you Mrs. Joseph Hardy?”

She frowned, deep lines suddenly etching ancient worry into a face that otherwise seemed quite youthful, at least in repose. “Yes, I’m Beth Hardy.”

“Could we have a word with you?”

“Of course.” Her response was pleasant but guarded as she opened the door and gestured them inside. “How can I help you?”

“We’re so sorry, Mrs. Hardy, but we’re not here with good news. There was a shooting in Minneapolis last night with three fatalities. We believe your husband was one of the victims.”

You never knew how survivors were going to react when you delivered this kind of news. Magozzi thought he’d seen the full spectrum of emotions over the years, but Beth Hardy didn’t express any of them. No horror, no grief, no hysteria; she just looked confused. “That’s impossible. There’s been a mistake. Joe isn’t even in the city. He’s up north on a hunting trip with his friends.”

“I’m sorry, but he was carrying his wallet.”

She shook her head strongly. “No. I’m sorry for whoever it was, and he might have had Joe’s wallet, but it wasn’t Joe. I told you, he’s up north. He called me when he got there, and again before he went to bed. I talked to Joe, I talked to his friends. They even put the phone on speaker so I could hear the loons crying on the lake.”

“The driver’s license photo matched the victim, Mrs. Hardy.”

“Well, it wasn’t Joe. I’ll call him right now and prove it.” She grabbed a phone from the foyer table and punched in a number, listened for a moment, then put it down. “Voice mail. I’ll try his friends.” She punched in another set of numbers and put the phone on speaker.

After a few rings, a Texas drawl filled the room. “Beth, darlin’, is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me. Put Joe on, will you, Claude?”

“Well, I’d be tickled to do that just as soon as he gets back.”

“Back from where? Where is he?”

“Lord knows. Woke up and he’d already lit out. We figured he went to pick us up some breakfast before the hunt. Should be back any time now. How about I have him give you a ring back?”

“Claude, the Minneapolis police are here. There was a shooting last night and one of the victims had Joe’s wallet. They think it’s him.”

“Well, that’s pure-ass impossible. We tucked Joey in not too long after he called you, then Chief and I stayed up ’til the wee hours, drinkin’ a little, jawin’ a little . . .” He stopped in midsentence and silence filled the foyer. Beth Hardy stood there, expressionless, as if someone had just pushed the pause button on her life.

“Beth?” The drawl came back through the speaker, gentle now. “Beth, Joe had his wallet with him last night. Pulled it out to show us that picture he took of you at Minnehaha Falls. Lord in heaven.”

Beth just closed her eyes.

• • •

No matter how
many rooms you had in your house, there was always the one that was truly lived in. For the Hardy family, it was a cozy sitting room with well-used leather furniture, a big-screen TV, and lots of personal stuff—family photos, trophies, little knickknacks picked up here and there that were meaningful to the home dwellers and no one else. It was a place of comfort, of family, of solace, and every survivor of a crime took the cops to the room that made them feel safest.

Magozzi noticed a framed photo of a robust man in his Marine dress uniform, a chest full of medals winking at the camera lens. There was no mistaking the man’s identity, despite the sixty- or seventy-pound weight loss that had occurred since this shot had been taken—this was a photo of Joe Hardy in full health. There were other photos of Joe with two older men—one tall and lanky, the other much broader, with a long black braid shot through with gray and striking features that alluded to Native American blood. In all the photos, the trio was standing over one dead animal or another, holding big guns and wearing bigger smiles. Joe’s hunting buddies.

“Please, sit down, Detectives.” Beth gestured to the sofa while she sank into an opposite facing club chair. The end table beside it was adorned with nothing more than a Kleenex box concealed in a bamboo tissue holder, a poignant and telling detail. When life circumstances made you cry a lot—and cancer tended to have that effect on one’s lachrymal glands—you integrated useful survival tools into the decor.

Even though Beth Hardy was the perfect portrait of a military wife—brave, dry-eyed, and probably in shock to learn that her husband had been killed by a bullet instead of cancer—she still pulled out several tissues and crumpled them in her hands, worrying them like prayer beads in her lap. The Kimberly-Clark rosary—Magozzi and Gino had seen it countless times. “Tell me what happened, Detectives, because I’m very confused right now.”

Magozzi leaned forward in his seat. “We were called to a crime scene early this morning, at six-forty-two Camden Drive. We found your husband and two other men outside. All of them had guns. It’s our assumption that they killed each other, but ballistics will have to officially confirm that.”

She nodded slowly. “Joe always carried a gun. He was being treated for pancreatic cancer at Riverside and the neighborhood made him nervous.”

Gino nodded a sympathetic acknowledgment. “Does that address on Camden mean anything to you or did Joe ever mention it?”

“No. I only know it’s close to the hospital. I grew up in that neighborhood, and so did Joe.” She turned to look out the window. “I don’t know why he was down there. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Can you think of any circumstances where your husband might have come back to Minneapolis unexpectedly? Perhaps to visit his doctor?”

She shook her head adamantly. “Not without calling me. And not without telling his friends. And if he’d been that sick, he would have gone to a hospital close to Elbow Lake.” Beth Hardy looked down at her lap, at the shredded tissue making sad, stringy confetti on her thighs. “But if he had come down for treatment, he wouldn’t have parked on Camden. He always parked in the hospital lot.”

Gino and Magozzi shared a pained glance. “We found his car in the hospital lot, Mrs. Hardy,” Magozzi said. “And we asked ourselves that same question. We thought that maybe he’d become disoriented because of his condition and got lost. Stumbled into a bad situation at a bad time of night. If you know the area, you know there’s a lot of gang activity there now, a lot of shady characters, and . . . well . . . a man walking into somebody’s yard at that hour of the night, maybe asking for help, might cause problems.” Magozzi hesitated and then jumped in. “Especially that particular yard.”

“Why that particular yard?”

“You haven’t seen the news today?”

She shook her head.

“The house where we found your husband was filled with weapons and explosives. Which might explain why the two men inside considered anyone approaching the house a threat.”

Beth looked over at the photograph of Joe in his dress blues. “Where is he?” she whispered.

Gino and Magozzi shared a miserable glance. It was one thing to hear somebody you loved had died; it was another thing altogether to imagine them in a morgue cooler getting prodded and violated by a stranger. “He’s with the Medical Examiner,” Magozzi finally said.

“When will he be . . . released?”

“I can promise you we’ll do everything we can to make sure it’s as soon as possible.”

Beth nodded woodenly. “Thank you for that.”