Magozzi suppressed a smile, wondering how many government databases had been violated last night, not caring at all. ‘What about all the bogus names and addresses? Claude Balls, that type of thing?’
‘We found them all,’ Grace MacBride said impatiently. ‘There were no complicated trails, nothing to indicate that anyone on that list was making a serious effort to hide their identity. Some of them were probably kids having a little fun; a lot were probably ordinary people trying to preserve their privacy and stay off mailing lists; but not one of the names on that list demonstrated anything close to the kind of computer skills we ran up against tracing those e-mails. We don’t think the killer is on that list, but if you insist on checking them out, you now have a name and a legitimate address for every single one of them.’
Magozzi took the papers from Roadrunner and stared down at them. ‘Good. That’ll help. But if he isn’t on here . . .’
‘Then he got into the site through a back door.’ She finished his thought. ‘And that means he has the whole game.’
Chief Malcherson just closed his eyes.
Ten minutes later, Magozzi was at his desk on hold with St Peter’s, suffering through a grating, tinny version of an organ fugue.
Gino walked up with two large white deli bags that smelled like heaven. He plopped a jumbo roast beef sandwich and a large coffee down in front of him. ‘You look pissed, Leo.’
‘Some nun put me on hold. It’s a little early for lunch, isn’t it?’
Gino glanced at his watch. ‘Hell, no. It’s nine-thirty already.’ He settled in at his own desk with a triple-decker turkey club.
Magozzi put the phone on speaker and the music leaked out in all its low-fidelity glory. Gino stared at the phone in disbelief. ‘God, that should be illegal.’
‘Everybody sells out to Muzak eventually. Even Bach. Any word from the mall?’
‘All’s quiet on the western front,’ Gino mumbled through a mouthful.
The organ music stopped abruptly and a frail, elderly female voice answered. ‘Hello?’
Magozzi snatched the receiver and introduced himself to the Mother Superior of St Peter’s.
After five minutes, Magozzi was fully satisfied that St Peter’s was a dead end. Yes, the school had computers, no, the students didn’t have unsupervised access to them, yes some students had their own computers, but when he mentioned that he was investigating a multiple homicide case in Minneapolis, she just laughed.
‘You won’t find your suspect here, Detective. We stopped taking older children years ago – our oldest class is the fifth grade.’
And of course all the St Peter’s employees, past and present, were either nuns or priests, none of whom were a good fit for the profile of a traveling homicidal maniac. But she was cooperative, patient, and sweet as could be, although Magozzi harbored a deeply ingrained mistrust of sweet old Mother Superiors from his own childhood experiences. He just knew there was a big wooden ruler lurking in the black folds of her habit.
By the end of the conversation, he’d apparently charmed her enough to take pity on him. With a heartfelt ‘God bless you,’ she passed him on to Sister Mary Margaret in records.
When he finally finished with Sister Mary Margaret, Gino had already lain waste to most of his sandwich and half a piece of chocolate pie. ‘So what’s the news from New York?’
‘Not much. Probably dead in the water, although their record keeper is a computer fanatic and has every single scrap of data from the past thirty years computerized and stored on-line.’
‘Suspect?’
‘Highly unlikely. She’s a sixty-year-old nun in a wheelchair.’
‘So what’s this “sexy voice” bullshit I overheard? I know you’ve been single for a while, but even you wouldn’t stoop to seducing an elderly, disabled nun.’
Magozzi smiled. ‘She sounded like Lauren Bacall and I told her so. Then she gave me the password so we can access all their data.’
‘Great. So what do we do now, print out a list of every student who was ever enrolled and see if we get a match from the registration list, or what?’
‘I guess. For all the good it will do. How’s Tommy doing with the Monkeewrench bunch?’
‘They’re all jammed into that fast-food wastebasket he calls an office, busier than a bunch of psycho bees. Poked my head in a couple times, got sick of hearing him say, “Gee, man, that’s so cool.” Friggin’ fawning turncoat, is what he is. You still want to interview ’em?’
‘Oh yeah.’ Magozzi unwrapped his sandwich and smeared horseradish from a little plastic packet on the obscenely large pile of meat. So much for the diet. He’d taken one bite when Chief Malcherson appeared at his elbow.
‘The FBI has left the building,’ he said.
Gino nearly spit out a mouthful of turkey club. Chief Malcherson never joked – ever – and this one wasn’t bad.
‘Hey, Chief, you’re a funny guy.’
‘What do you mean? What was funny about that?’
Gino and Magozzi exchanged a glance and went poker-faced. ‘Nothing, sir. So the suits are gone. Hope they didn’t go away mad.’
Malcherson moved around the desk to look directly at Magozzi. ‘Whose fingerprints did you submit to AFIS last night?’
‘I’d rather not say just yet.’
Malcherson’s white brows shot halfway up his forehead. ‘Excuse me?’
Magozzi took a breath. ‘Chief, I’m not trying to keep you out of the loop, but if I tell you, you’re going to have to tell them, and I’m not so sure that’s a good idea just yet. I’m going to have to ask you to trust me on this for a while.’
Malcherson stared at him for a long time, but his brows went back to their normal resting place. ‘They said they wouldn’t even talk about letting us look at the file, whose ever it is, until we give them a name to go with the prints.’
Magozzi shrugged. ‘They won’t give us the file no matter what we do.’
‘Probably not. Can you work around that?’
‘We’re trying. I’ll let you know as soon as I have something.’
After Malcherson left, Gino leaned across his desk and said quietly, ‘I’m not real comfortable crossing swords with the Feds for these people, buddy.’
‘You want to bail?’
‘Not on your life. I said I wasn’t comfortable; I didn’t say I wasn’t having fun. I’d like to know what we’re protecting MacBride from, though.’
‘We’re going to find that out right now.’
28
The streets of Calumet were frosty and still as Halloran drove to work over two hours after Bonar had left for the church, bag in hand for Father Newberry’s shell casing.
There had been record-breaking cold temperatures the night before, and the town’s love affair with Halloween was certainly going to suffer for it. Decorative cornstalks huddled around front yard lampposts, their dried leaves ragged from the wind, and on almost every porch a carved pumpkin sagged in on itself, as if it had sucked in too deep a breath.
The streets outside the office were strangely empty without all the media trucks, vanished like thieves in the night now that the town had gone a whole twenty-four hours without a grisly death.
Goddamned vultures, he thought, cursing the press first, then the cold as he got out of his car, and then his own foolishness as his head pounded with every step he took toward his office. He vowed never, ever to drink that much again, which he did every time he drank that much.
Settled at his desk at last, a third cup of coffee sloshing in his queasy stomach, he cosigned a waiting stack of payroll checks, then had dispatch call Sharon Mueller in off the road. He spent the next hour alone with his hangover and the Internet, waiting for her.
