‘Go on,’ Halloran said at last. ‘Did you get a pronoun for us?’
Sharon nodded absently, looking out the window. ‘He. A little boy, name of Brian. Five years old when they dropped him off.’
Halloran waited for her to shift back to no-nonsense mode, knowing it wouldn’t take long. You couldn’t get bogged down in sympathy when you worked with abused kids, she’d told him once. It paralyzed you, made you totally ineffective. Two seconds later she looked back at him, brown eyes sharp and focused once again, and he thought maybe he liked her better the other way.
‘Did the school know he was a hermaphrodite?’ he asked.
‘Not from the Bradfords, but they found out soon enough, at his first physical. “The Aberration,” is what the Mother Superior called it, delicate-tongued old bitch . . . sorry. I keep forgetting you’re Catholic.’
‘Lapsed.’
‘Whatever. Anyway, since he was presented as a boy when he was dumped there, they treated him as a boy, and as far as she knew, a few nuns and the doctor were the only ones who ever knew.’
‘What, this school had individual showers? Private rooms?’ Bonar asked.
Sharon smiled ruefully. ‘Hermaphrodites don’t generally drop their pants in the company of their peers, particularly if the condition is obvious, as it apparently was in this case.’ She took back her notebook and flipped a few pages. ‘His parents never showed up again, never called. Paid the whole tuition the day they dropped him off. As for the kid, he was a loner, naturally, but very bright. He got his high-school diploma when he was sixteen, and then he disappeared, too. They got a transcript request a couple years later, otherwise they never saw or heard from him again.’
Halloran blew out a sigh and leaned back. ‘Where’d they send the transcript?’
Sharon smiled a little. ‘Georgia State in Atlanta. Interesting, isn’t it? Right back to where he was born, but the Mother Superior said something else that interests me more.’ She stopped, intentionally, Halloran thought, smiling like a kid with a secret.
‘You want me to beg?’
‘Desperately.’
Bonar laughed. ‘Come on, what have you got?’
Sharon took a breath and swallowed the canary. ‘The Mother Superior said that in all the years she’s been at the school they have never once gotten a call from a law enforcement agency before, and wasn’t it peculiar that this morning she had two.’
Halloran frowned at her. ‘You and who else?’
‘Minneapolis PD.’
‘Did she say what they wanted?’
‘Something to do with computers and an e-mail address, but that’s all she’d tell me. Damn nuns think there’s a confidentiality agreement every time they open their mouths. She said we’d have to ask Minneapolis if we wanted to know more.’ She tore a sheet off her notebook and passed it to Halloran. ‘Here’s the name and number of the guy who called. Maybe it’s nothing, but it seemed like a hell of a coincidence. Gave me a bad feeling.’
‘Detective . . . what’s the name? I can’t read this.’
‘Magozzi. Detective Leo Magozzi.’
‘What’s the “H” stand for?’
Sharon smiled at him. ‘Homicide.’
29
Magozzi decided to interview the Monkeewrench partners in the task force room. The psychologists would have told him he was making a big mistake. It was too large a space, too open. Claustrophobic surroundings were a real plus when you were trying to get information from the reluctant. After a few hours in one of the tiny interview rooms downstairs, most people would tell you anything, just to get out.
But Magozzi didn’t have a few hours to wear down this group. If he was going to wage psychological warfare, it had to be high-impact. Before they came in he arranged chairs in a straight line in the front – no kindergarten semicircle to make anyone feel too secure, and no desks or tables to hide behind. Leave them open, vulnerable, and put nothing between them and the big board where eight-by-ten glossies of the dead looked down at them.
He took his usual place with one hip cocked on the front desk, friendly teacher facing the class. But he’d placed the chairs very close to the desk, less than three feet away. He’d be in their space, and from what he knew of these people, that would make them uncomfortable enough.
Gino brought them in, closed the door, then leaned against it, arms folded across his chest.
‘Please have a seat.’ Magozzi gestured at the arrow-straight row of chairs, and watched in bemused silence as they instinctively negated his foolish attempts at psychology. Without a moment’s hesitation or a single exchanged word, they all moved their chairs a few feet back from the desk and into the forbidden semicircle, Grace MacBride in the center, the others fanned protectively around her. He wondered if they realized how obvious it was.
At least they looked at the pictures; every one of them. The twenty-year-old seminary student who’d found jogging a deadly pastime, his youthful features as serene and composed as they had probably been in life; Wilbur Daniels, whose broad, flabby face looked deceptively innocent on an autopsy table; and most disturbing of all, the seventeen-year-old Russian girl who looked heartbreakingly childlike with all the makeup washed away. Rambachan had done that with great and tender care, before her mother came to see her.
Grace MacBride looked quietly at each photograph for a prolonged moment, as if she were forcing herself to do it, as if she owed it to them. The rest of them swept the board with their eyes very fast, not a masochist in the group. Except maybe for Roadrunner.
The crime-scene photos were up there, too; terrifying duplicates of the crime-scene photos in the game and Roadrunner couldn’t take his eyes off the girl on the stone angel, no doubt remembering the night he had positioned himself in that very place, setting the stage for the girl’s murder. ‘Jesus God,’ he mumbled, and finally looked away.
Annie Belinsky turned a hateful glare on Magozzi. ‘Cheap shot, Detective.’
He didn’t even bother to pretend ignorance. ‘You didn’t notice them when you were in here earlier?’
‘Sure we noticed them.’ She pursed her pumpkin orange lips angrily. ‘But they weren’t staring right at us.’
‘Would you like me to turn the board around so you don’t have to look at them?’
Harley Davidson shifted his bulk with a squeak of leather. ‘What I want is for you to say whatever the hell you’re going to say so we can get out of here and get back to work trying to trace this guy.’
Magozzi raised his brows. ‘Good. We’re all on the same page.’ He looked at each of them in turn, and he did it slowly, letting the silence hang there, letting them read into it whatever they liked. The room was deathly still. ‘I’m going to lay this out to you the way we see it, and then you’re going to have to decide whether or not to answer our questions. And then you’re going to have to live with that decision.’
‘What, no thumbscrews?’ Mitch Cross asked bitterly.
‘We don’t use thumbscrews anymore, asshole,’ Gino snarled from the door, confirming that he and Mitch Cross would probably never be bowling partners. ‘Too slow.’
Magozzi shot him a warning look, then turned back to the others. ‘The thing is, you people are too tangled up in this case, and the longer it goes on, the more alarm bells go off. At first we thought it might be simple. That maybe there is some nut out there who just played your game and thought it would be fun to act it out for real. Then we found out that none of you is who you pretend to be, that there’s something back there you’re all hiding. We don’t know if you’re criminals on the lam, victims on the run, or both at the same time. Maybe there are warrants out all over the country for who you really are. Maybe you ticked off the mob, we don’t know.
‘And today you tell us you’re supposedly getting messages from the killer. Now you people might not think there’s a connection between what’s happening now and whatever the hell happened to send you underground over ten years ago, but to objective observers, all of you, and especially Grace MacBride, are in this so deep you’d have to be blind not to see it.’
Roadrunner looked nervously at his friends. Annie Belinsky, sitting next to him, squeezed his arm with a plump hand in either reassurance or warning. He took a breath that sounded too big for such a stick of a man.
