Want To Play (7 page)

‘No problem. I’ll just tell them I was trying to sleep my way to the top of the Kingsford County Sheriff’s Department.’

‘You don’t have to go that far. Tonight I’d give this job away.’

Sharon smiled. ‘The job wasn’t exactly what I wanted.’

Halloran watched her punching numbers on her own phone, thinking that he would never understand women.

After an hour working the phones, making enemies of sleeping law officers all across the country, Halloran finally caught a break.

‘Chitterings? Hell, yes, I remember them.’

The minute Halloran had mentioned the name to the California detective, the sleep had gone out of his voice. Halloran could almost imagine him jerking up in bed. He covered the mouthpiece and said to Sharon, ‘Got something.’

‘Damn explosions could have taken out the whole neighborhood if the houses hadn’t been so far apart,’ the detective went on.

‘Explosions?’

‘Yeah. What happened was somebody turned on all the gas in the house, dumped the pilots, then torched it. Blew like a son of a bitch, then burned right to the ground before FD even made it to the scene. Santa Anas that night, you know. Fire rules the world when there’s a Santa Ana wind blowing.’

Halloran was scribbling furiously on the back of an envelope. ‘What about the Chitterings?’

‘Well, that’s the weird part,’ the detective said. ‘They had a little guest house out by the pool. Said they were sleeping there that night, for no good reason I ever heard. And that’s about all I’m going to give until you tell me what you’re working.’

‘Double homicide.’

‘No shit. The Chitterings?’

‘I guess. Only they called themselves the Kleinfeldts here.’

‘Huh. Might have guessed. You know I worked that case for about a week, but before I could really get into it they just disappeared. Poof. Sent me a note, if you can believe that. Sent me a goddamned note saying the fire was their fault, some kind of bullshit about trying to fix the hot water heater.’

‘Is that possible?’

‘Hell, no, it isn’t possible. Arson confirmed accelerants, kerosene, in five different locations in the house, and you know what the Chitterings said? Lamps. Friggin’ kerosene lamps. Bullshit is what I said, but my chief is clicking his heels because we can clear a case, and so he shuts me down cold.’

‘I hear you,’ Halloran said.

‘So they bought it, huh?’

‘Looks that way.’

‘Listen. Department doesn’t have a file here, since according to the vics there was no crime, but I’ve still got my notes. Keep ’em at home. I’ll fax them out to you in the morning if you let me know what you dig up. Damn case has been driving me nuts for years.’

Halloran agreed, gave him the fax number, then hung up and filled in Sharon. When he finished, she leaned back in her chair and whistled softly. ‘Man, that was twelve years ago, and they were still scared. This has got to be some serious vendetta.’

He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and thought that if he didn’t move soon, he’d fall asleep where he sat. ‘You get anything?’

‘Zilch in Dallas. Chicago is a maybe. The on-duty guy thought he remembered some hullabaloo about a Sandford family – that’s the name they were using there – that went down years ago, just before he joined up. Sandford’s not exactly a unique name, though, so it could be nothing. Said he’d have someone dig through the archives tomorrow.’

She yawned and raised her arms in a stretch that showed Halloran a little more than he thought he should see of what was under her uniform shirt. ‘I’m whipped.’

‘I seem to remember telling you to go home a long time ago.’

‘Yeah, well, I seem to remember telling you the same thing.’ She gave him a glance. ‘You look worse than I do.’

‘Always did.’

She smiled a little, stood, pulled on her jacket, reached in to settle her shoulder holster properly, then zipped up. ‘Feels good, doesn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘Getting the first date out of the way.’ She pulled a dark watch cap over her head, flattening a fringe of brown against her forehead. ‘Next time we can sleep together.’

Well, that certainly woke him up.

The dead jogger by the river had been the lead story on all the stations in Minneapolis, which was almost a miracle, Detective Leo Magozzi thought, being that it was the middle of football season.

On orders from the chief, he and his partner, Gino Rolseth, had worked the case all day, shunting last week’s murder of a Hmong teenage girl over to Gangs. Gino hadn’t liked that. ‘You know how much this sucks, Leo?’ he’d complained bitterly on their way out of the chief’s office. ‘We get pulled off one murder and slapped on another, and don’t tell me it isn’t politics when the one we’re pulled off of is a Hmong gang member and the one we get put on just happens to be a nice white boy in his first year at the seminary.’

The nice white boy had a set of very nice white parents that he and Gino destroyed in the few seconds it took to say, ‘We are so sorry to tell you that your son is dead.’

After they’d asked the questions they had to ask, they waited until friends of the parents arrived to take their place in the new and terrible solitude, and then they walked away from the dead-eyed, emotional ruins that had been parents before their arrival. Funny. The mother of the Hmong girl had looked just the same.

Gino hadn’t been much good after that. He always took the kids hard, and Leo sent him home early so he could look at his own kids and touch them and talk to them while all the time he’d be thinking,
Thank God, thank God.

Magozzi didn’t have any kids to talk to, or any god to thank, for that matter, so he stayed at the station until eight o’clock, making calls, sifting through interviews and the preliminary forensics report, trying to find a lead that would hint at either a motive or a suspect on the dead jogger. So far, he’d come up empty. Jonathan Blanchard was almost a caricature of a model citizen: a 4.0 seminary student who was putting himself through school working twenty hours a week – Christ, he volunteered at a homeless shelter on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Unless he was running drugs or laundering mob money out of the soup kitchen’s back door, they were looking at a dead end.

Frustrated and melancholy, Magozzi had finally given up for the night and gone home to his modest stucco on the edge of uptown Minneapolis. He ate a microwave dinner, sorted his mail, then escaped up a rickety second-floor ladder into his attic studio to paint.

Before the divorce, he’d painted in the garage, slapping mosquitoes in the summer and standing in a circle of space heaters in the winter that doubled their electric bill. The day Heather moved out, taking her aversion to turpentine and chemical sensitivity to anything she didn’t buy at the Lancôme counter with her, he’d dragged all the paraphernalia inside and set up in the living room. For two months he painted there, just because he could, and only hauled everything up to the attic when his Froot Loops started to taste like mineral spirits.

He took a deep, calming breath as he popped up through the hatch, savoring the warm tang of turpentine and oil paints that saturated the air. Now this was real aromatherapy.

It was almost two o’clock in the morning by the time he washed his brushes and crawled into bed, exhausted. The fall landscape was still just blocks of color, a mess really; but it would shape up nicely, he thought as he drifted off to sleep.

The bedside phone shrilled him awake at a little after four. For a millisecond, he fantasized about drawing his 9mm and silencing the phone forever, but the fantasy dissolved and he reached for the receiver, wondering if at any time in the history of the telecommunicating world had an early-morning phone call brought good news. He doubted it. Good news could always wait, but for some reason, bad news never could. ‘Magozzi here.’

‘Get your ass over to Lakewood Cemetery, Leo,’ Gino said over the phone. ‘We got a real sparkler this time. BCA’s on their way.’

‘Shit.’

‘Shit is right, my friend.’

Magozzi moaned, tossing his warm covers aside and cringing at the rush of frigid air he hoped would shock him into consciousness. ‘Why the hell do you sound like you’ve been up for an hour already?’

‘Whaddaya think? I been up half the night with the Accident.’ He was talking about his six-month-old son, a surprise arrival thirteen years after the last one.

Magozzi let out a long-suffering sigh. ‘You got coffee?’

‘I got coffee – my sainted wife is loading up the thermos as we speak. And bring your parka. It’s frigging freezing.’

Half an hour later, Magozzi and Gino were standing in Lakewood Cemetery, staring up in shocked silence at an enormous stone statue of an angel with massive wings extended. A dead girl was draped over one wing, arms and legs dangling on either side, her face partially obscured by a curtain of blood-stained blond hair. She wore a red dress, net nylons, and stiletto heels.

Crime scene had set up bright white lights on tall aluminum tripods to illuminate the gruesome tableau and the whole effect was surreal. Magozzi couldn’t quite shake the feeling that he’d been transported to the set of a Kubrick film. Or a B horror flick.

He looked over at a row of crumbling grave markers backlit by the kliegs and saw little tendrils of mist curling on the ground around them.

He blinked a couple times, trying to dispel the image. Then he realized that it was real fog, and sometimes in real cemeteries, real fog crept along the ground the same way it did in the movies.

Gino took a gulp of coffee. ‘Christ. This looks like some cult bullshit to me.’

Jimmy Grimm from BCA forensics was making a meticulous circuit around the pedestal of the grave marker, tweezing up minuscule pieces of evidence and bagging them.

Anantanand Rambachan stood off to one side, waiting for Jimmy to finish. He gave the detectives a melancholy nod. No banter this morning.

Magozzi looked back up at the body. ‘She’s young,’ he said quietly. ‘Just a kid.’

Gino took a closer look. Not much older than Helen, he thought, then pushed that thought right out of his mind. His fourteen-year-old daughter didn’t belong in the same mind where images of dead girls were floating. ‘Christ,’ he muttered again.

Magozzi moved in a little closer, examining the dark drip marks down the angel’s side. ‘Who found her?’

Grateful for the distraction, Gino nodded toward a pair of bedraggled-looking college boys wearing U of M letter jackets. A uniform was interviewing the lanky, blond one while the shorter, dark kid dry-heaved on his hands and knees.

Magozzi clucked his tongue, genuinely sorry for the kids. How many years would it take before the nightmares stopped for them? Maybe never. ‘Let’s go talk to them so we can send the poor bastards home.’

As they approached, the officer turned and gave them a grateful look. ‘They’re all yours.’ He leaned forward and spoke confidentially. ‘You want some advice? Talk to the blond kid, name’s Jeff Rasmussen. The other one’s still drunk as a skunk and as you might have noticed, he pukes every time you ask him a question.’

Gino moved in on Jeff Rasmussen, while Magozzi hung back and watched. Sometimes body language told a better story than words.

Jeff bobbed his head up and down nervously when Gino introduced himself. He had glittery, pale blue eyes shot through with red that kept darting toward the statue. His friend looked up miserably and tried to focus without much success.

‘You want to tell us what happened, Jeff?’

Jeff bobbed his head again. ‘Sure. Sure. Yeah.’ Very nervous. Very wired. ‘We were at the hockey game . . . then after, we went out for a couple drinks . . . they have three-for-ones at Chelsea’s on Mondays. So we stayed until bar close – we were a little lit, you know? Hitched a ride with a friend – he had a twelve-pack in the trunk – so we drove around and told him to stop here. He chickened out, but he gave us a couple beers and . . . well . . .’ He paused and his face flushed bright red. ‘Is that trespassing?’

Gino nodded.

Jeff seemed to fold in on himself. ‘Jesus, my parents’ll kill me . . .’

‘Let’s not worry about the trespassing now, Jeff. At least you weren’t driving drunk.’

‘No, no! I’d never do that, I don’t even have a car . . .’

Gino cleared his throat impatiently. ‘Tell me what you saw when you got here.’

Jeff swallowed hard. ‘Well . . . we didn’t see anything. It was empty, you know? Late. So we walked around for a while, looking for the Angel so we could do the Dare.’

‘What dare?’

‘The Angel of Death Dare.’ His eyes shifted back and forth between the two detectives. ‘You know . . . the Dare?’

Gino and Magozzi both shook their heads.

‘Oh. Well, there’s this ghost story, legend, whatever. Says this guy buried here was some dark priest or something for a Satanic cult. He bought the angel for his grave marker and told his followers that he’d put a curse on it – if you held the angel’s hands and looked into her face, you’d see the way you would die.’

Magozzi turned and looked up at the blank, stone eyes of the angel, then at the dead girl’s limp form, wondering if she’d looked into the angel’s eyes before she died.

‘Anyhow,’ Jeff continued, ‘we found the angel . . . at first we thought it was a joke or something. Like a doll? It was just too weird, I mean, this is Minneapolis, right? But then we saw the blood and then . . . well, Kurt.’ He jabbed a thumb in the puking kid’s direction. ‘Kurt had a cell phone and we called you guys.’

‘That’s it?’

Jeff looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Yeah. That’s it.’

‘You didn’t see anything? Didn’t hear anything?’

‘Nope. Just a bunch of tombstones. There was nobody else here.’ His eyes wandered to the body again.

‘So it was just you two in the cemetery, you’re sure about that?’

Jeff looked at Gino again, and his eyes sprang wide in panic. ‘Jesus, you don’t think . . . oh shit, you don’t think
we
did this, do you?’

Gino pulled out a card and handed it to the kid. ‘You think of anything else, you call this number, okay?’

‘Yeah. Yeah.’

Magozzi and Gino walked back to the statue in silence. Rambachan was up there with the girl now, but Jimmy Grimm was walking toward them, his round, ruddy face solemn. ‘Didn’t get shit, guys,’ he said in a gloomy voice. ‘A couple hairs, probably the vic’s, couple bags of trace from the surrounding area, just for good measure, even though they’re contaminated as hell. No personal effects. Rambachan says it’s another .22.’