especially with the Hammond wedding. So he sees his big chance to carve out his own little column for posterity. He plays psycho, gets his rocks off, and it’s all good, clean fun to him. The next best thing to being there. Plus it gives him something for the scrapbooks, something to show the grandkids.’
Annie scowled. ‘Nice. “Hey look, kids, your granpappy was a real sick asshole, what do you think of that?” ’
‘Lots of wackos out there,’ Harley said. ‘What I want to know is why he only sent it to Grace. Why not the main Monkeewrench e-mail? Or to one of us?’
Grace said, ‘Think about it. If you were a nutcase and wanted to scare somebody, which e-mail address would you pick? Not Harley Davidson, probably not Roadrunner, and definitely not BallBuster.’
Annie looked up at the ceiling innocently.
‘No, you’d send it to me. GraceM. That sounds safe.’
‘Okay, so I’d be a bad psycho,’ Harley confessed. ‘So maybe the e-mail is from the killer, maybe it’s from some harmless, wacked-out gamer. We’ll play it safe and pretend it
‘What?’ Annie asked, slapping Harley’s hand as he reached for another biscuit. ‘That’s mine, pal.’
Harley relinquished the last biscuit to the baker. ‘Well, doesn’t anyone think this whole thing is a pretty amazing coincidence? I mean, what are the odds that this would happen to the same five people twice in a lifetime?’
Roadrunner frowned and started twisting his napkin. ‘Makes me want to go out and buy a lottery ticket.’
‘That’s what I’m saying.’
‘This is totally different,’ Annie said sternly. ‘Just some asshole playing the game.’
‘That’s what I figured, too,’ Harley said. ‘We all did. But after this e-mail, it got a little more personal and I got to thinking.’ He hesitated and looked at Grace. ‘What if it’s
Grace was absolutely stone-faced; she’d gotten very good at that over the years, but it didn’t fool anyone at the table.
Roadrunner looked at her, saw what was inside, and shook his head vigorously. ‘No way. There’s no way he could find us, not in a million years. We all made sure of that. This is just a simple case of a homicidal maniac glomming onto a provocative concept and taking it to the extreme. He’s a game player and this is the ultimate game.’
‘I hope so, buddy,’ Harley said, and for a moment they were all so quiet that the chime of incoming e-mail from Grace’s office sounded like an explosion.
‘Oh, God.’ Grace closed her eyes.
Roadrunner got up without a word, went to the office, then came back several shades paler. ‘There’s a new e-mail,’ he said in a shaky voice. ‘I don’t know if it’s from the killer, but I think from the details he gave, it won’t be hard to figure it out.’
25
When the alarm went off at seven A.M. Wednesday morning, Magozzi figured he’d had about two hours of sleep, if you wanted to call it that. Mostly he’d tossed around in a quasi dream state, thrashing his sheets into a tangled ball at his feet, and he wouldn’t have rested that well if it hadn’t been for the double Scotch he’d downed before bed.
But even with the combined anesthesia of single malt and exhaustion, his brain had stayed in overdrive, tormenting him with a deluge of recapitulated data, ideas, and macabre images of the dead that stuttered to life in horrific black-and-white dreamscapes. Grace MacBride kept making guest appearances in his mental theater. He never really saw her face, just sensed her presence on the fringe of his subconscious where she floated like an angry ghost.
He’d gone back to the paddle wheeler last night, after he’d left her house. When he and Gino had wrapped things up there, they’d headed south to the Mall of America, cruised the empty parking ramps for an hour, then went back to the office to work the rosters.
The way he figured it, they probably didn’t have a single friend left in the whole department. They’d called over a hundred men well after midnight, putting things together, and then they’d called the chief, who’d certainly called the mayor and the governor and God knew how many others. There might have been a senior citizen somewhere in the suburbs whose phone
He showered and dressed in a stuporous fog, then headed downstairs, where the thermometer outside the kitchen window read fifteen degrees. He looked at it twice just to make sure, then hung his suitcoat over a kitchen chair, tucked his tie between the buttons of his shirt, and started making the first big breakfast he’d had in months. At this temperature, he rationalized, granola would be suicide. What he needed was calories.
He put bacon in one skillet, a lethal mix of eggs and cream in another, and popped in two slices of toast.
Late nights and cold mornings always made him miss Heather. Well, not Heather, specifically – what he really missed was the idea of marriage. Someone to come home to, another warm body in the house making warm body noises, a sympathetic ear, the companionable silence of understanding.
‘So get a dog,’ she’d said on the night she’d slapped the summons in his hand, right after telling him about the absolutely amazing number of men she’d met naked during the past year.
He’d spent bitter months cursing himself for a fool, grieving for a marriage he’d never had, suffering mightily under that egregious insult to his heritage and his machismo – what self-respecting hot-blooded Italian could live with himself after being dumped by a supposedly cold-blooded Swede?
He’d tried to assign blame to Heather, but mostly accepted it all, and gradually became a caricature of himself: an angry, brooding Italian.
Family and friends worried, and in their individual distinctively unhelpful ways, tried to help. His mother told him it was what he got for not marrying a nice Italian girl; Gino said he’d always had doubts about the woman, she was a lawyer, for chrissakes; but surprisingly, it was Anant Rambachan who showed him how to let it go.
Six months ago they’d been crouched over the body of a young girl who had found more to love about heroin than life, when, apropos of nothing, Anant suddenly sat back on his heels and said, ‘It was, I believe, a very risky venture, Detective; marrying a woman whose name is grass.’
It had taken Magozzi a minute to catch up, to realize he was talking about Heather, and mentally he cringed. The whole damn city knew he’d been cuckolded.
‘She laid down.’ The Indian medical examiner smiled white in his dark skin, long-fingered hands spread in a gesture as matter of fact as if Magozzi had ended a meal instead of a marriage. ‘It is simply the nature of grass to lie down, is it not?’
Anant was a big believer in the nature of things, and probably placed an inordinate value on symbols, at least from a Judeo-Christian perspective, but something in what he said, or maybe the way he said it, just cut through all the crap.
Magozzi had taken a breath that felt like his first in a year, and from that moment on, everything had been different. The rest of the cops thought he’d gotten laid; his mother was certain he’d started going to Mass again. He’d considered telling her a Hindu had shown him the light, but he wasn’t sure her heart could take it.
He watched the morning news shows try to scare the shit out of the city while he ate his breakfast. The murders weren’t just big news; they were the only news.
How much intrepid reporters had managed to discover scared him. They knew about the game, they’d put all three murders together, and worst of all, they knew the profiles of the next two victims. Murder four, a female shopper at the Mall of America; murder five, an art teacher.
‘Our sources tell us there are twenty murders in the Monkeewrench game,’ one of the morning newscasters intoned. He was young, new, and looked like a Ken doll. Magozzi didn’t know him. ‘Which begs the question, are there seventeen more victims somewhere in this city, innocently going about their daily lives, unaware that they have been marked for death by a psychopathic killer?’
‘Jesus Christ.’ Magozzi hit the mute button and dove for the phone. It blurped an aborted ring just as he picked up the receiver.
‘I’ve been ringing your cell for the last hour,’ Gino said without preamble.
