Live Bait

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.

42

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