as fast as they could. Homicide cops – good homicide cops – spent a lot of time staring at the pictures of dead victims, absorbing details surviving family members never saw, unwittingly forming some kind of bond with people they’d never known in life, making a kind of unspoken promise.
In one way it was a little morbid, he supposed, and in another, it was almost tender. Anyone who said you had to shut off your emotions to be a homicide cop had it exactly backward.
‘Okay, listen up, everyone.’ Magozzi piled a thick stack of stapled handouts on the table in the front of the task force room and took a seat on the edge of the desk. ‘Fresh off the copier. We may have caught a break today, thanks to Dr Rambachan, who stayed up all night working on the paddle wheeler vic. Speaking of which, I’d like to thank everyone for the extra hours they’ve been putting in. I’ll give you a quick briefing, but if you’d like some light reading later, the actual autopsy report is included in your handout.’
There were a few chuckles and a couple sleepy groans as the task force that still wasn’t officially a task force lined up like zombies to retrieve the new material. Most of them had pulled a double yesterday, and Magozzi wondered if the son of a bitch who was responsible was suffering similarly or if his tweaked-out brain chemicals were keeping him wired.
He took the last swallow from the mug of great coffee the women downstairs had given him and continued. ‘Victim number three is Wilbur Daniels.’
‘His name was Wilbur?’ Johnny McLaren asked. He and Patrol Sergeant Freedman were sitting together this morning, bonded by what they surely considered their personal failure on the paddleboat last night. They both looked exhausted and defeated.
Magozzi looked from one to the other, then threw them a bone. ‘You did good work on the boat last night.’
‘Right,’ Freedman rumbled in a sarcastic basso-profundo. ‘The operation was a success but the patient died.’
‘He was dead a long time before you got there,’ Magozzi reminded him, deciding that if they needed any more head-patting than that, they were going to have to go to the department shrink. Right now he just didn’t have the time. ‘Wilbur Daniels, forty-two years old, ID’d through military prints from a stint in the army back in the eighties. Never been married and we’re still trying to find next of kin. He is . . . was . . . employed as a marketing rep for Devon Office Supplies on Washington for six years and we have his boss on ice downstairs waiting to be interviewed. You up for it, Louise?’
‘You bet.’
‘Note that Dr Rambachan found semen in his underwear and has determined that Wilbur Daniels ejaculated very near the time of his death. He also bit his own hand, presumably out of passion, so there was obviously a sexual element involved. Whether or not it has anything to do with the killer, we don’t know yet.’
‘So maybe he was just wanking in the bathroom and got a little surprise in the form of a bullet to the head,’ Louise offered.
‘Possible. Or maybe the killer brought him there under the auspices of a little afternoon delight.’
‘So if our doer’s a man, that makes Daniels a fag,’ Louise stated frankly.
‘Not very PC, Louise,’ Gino said.
She tossed her head indignantly. ‘Hey, it’s okay for me to say “fag.” ’ She turned her attention back to Magozzi. ‘So if he was gay, what are you thinking? Maybe a series of hate crimes?’
‘Not at this point,’ Magozzi said. ‘We don’t have any info on the girl on the angel yet, but there’s absolutely no indication that the jogger was a homosexual. But that Wilbur Daniels might have been is a possibility to keep in mind when we retrace his steps before he set foot on that paddle wheeler. And that takes us to page three of the autopsy report. Stomach contents.’
‘Oh, God, I haven’t even had breakfast yet,’ Detective Peterson groaned. He was a recent transfer from St Paul, whip-thin with a pallor to his skin that made Magozzi think meat hadn’t passed his lips in several years.
‘Okay, there was beer and eight mostly undigested mini corn dogs in the vic’s stomach. The very sort of mini corn dogs they serve at Steamboat Parker’s Grill down by the river and nowhere else in the general vicinity. He was there less than an hour before he was shot on the boat. McLaren, you get down there with his photo as soon as they open. Maybe somebody remembers him, or better yet, maybe he was with someone, and if so, then chances are pretty good that’s our killer and we can have a sketch worked up for the media.’
Aaron Langer, fresh from outside in a black topcoat and leather gloves, sporting violet circles under his eyes, strode into the conference room waving a sheet of paper. ‘Sorry I’m late. We just got an ID on the girl in the cemetery. Maybe something we can work with.’
‘Terrific. Tell us what you’ve got.’
Langer peeled off his gloves, assumed his lectern demeanor, and addressed the room. ‘Missing Persons got a call from the Mounties last night. A Toronto couple had reported their eighteen-year-old daughter missing after she took a Greyhound to Denver via Minneapolis. The bus stopped at the downtown terminal two nights ago, with a layover.’
‘The night of the cemetery murder,’ Magozzi said.
‘Right. Her name was Alena Vershovsky. She and her parents emigrated from Kiev five years ago. Her parents are also both computer programmers, which might mean nothing – half the Russian immigrants are computer programmers. But something to bear in mind. Anyhow, a family friend in Denver met her bus yesterday, but she wasn’t on it. We just confirmed a match on the dental records. I’ve got two guys on their way down to the terminal now, and we can all pray somebody can give us a visual on this piece of shit.’
There was a long silence. Nobody had ever heard Langer curse before.
‘Any chance she was a homosexual?’
‘Doesn’t seem likely. Apparently she had a pretty active dating life. But who knows? Anybody can swing both ways. Why?’
‘It’s a possibility with the guy on the paddle wheeler. We were hoping for a common thread.’
Langer shrugged. ‘Nothing pops so far.’
‘Okay, let’s leave it alone for now. So we’ll have people canvassing the bus terminal and Steamboat Parker’s, looking for someone who was in both places, and we’ve got a team still working the registration list of game- players . . .’
‘We’re never going to get anything out of that list,’ Louise Washington complained. ‘I worked an extra shift on that thing last night and only cleared five players.’
Magozzi nodded grimly. ‘I know it’s slow, but we’ve got to keep working it. Freedman? How are they doing on the door-to-doors?’
‘During the day? Slow as crippled snails. Most of the people who signed on to the game with legitimate addresses apparently have legitimate jobs, because nobody’s home. We’re going to be knocking on a lot of doors after dark. Plus you took a lot of my people for the mall.’
‘I know. Couldn’t be helped.’
‘Is our presence on the street compromised?’ Chief Malcherson asked Freedman.
‘It’s thin, sir.’
‘How thin?’
‘I wouldn’t want it to get any thinner.’
Magozzi nodded. ‘Okay. We’re getting some highway patrol and county people to help out. You put them where you need to fill the holes. Gino, you want to lay out the mall?’
‘Yeah.’ Gino pushed away from the wall by the door and managed to stand semi-upright. ‘Murder number four in the game, folks, staged at the Mall of America.’
Everyone started flipping through their files, looking for the fourth murder scenario.
‘In the parking ramps, right?’ Louise Washington asked.
‘Right. And since this dirtbag’s been doing one every twenty-four, we gotta figure it goes down today. In the ramps, in a car, no specific make or model. We were a day late and a dollar short on the riverboat, and we don’t want to make that mistake again, so Magozzi and I scoped the place last night, put together some shift rosters, and had people in place by four A.M. We’ve got two officers on every ramp level, and mall management called in all their security, which gives us another set of eyes on each deck. They also doubled up monitors on the closed-circuit cameras.’
‘So it’s covered,’ Sergeant Freedman said.
