Want To Play (Monkeewrench)

smiled at the memory, which to Magozzi’s amazement was apparently a pleasant one.

Mitch Cross was looking superior again, now that the secrets were all out and there was nothing left to bluster about. ‘So now you know everything. Are you satisfied, Magozzi?’ He used his last name like a weapon, leaving off the title.

‘Not quite. If Ms MacBride was never the direct target in Atlanta, if the rest of you, as the people closest to her, were probably a lot higher on that killer’s hit list – why is she the one who carries a gun and lives in a vault?’

The five exchanged sheepish glances.

‘Uh, actually.’ Roadrunner scratched his left earlobe. ‘We all have pretty decent security systems, and . . .’

‘We all carry.’ Mitch shrugged. ‘As I’m sure your desk sergeant will tell you if he ever gets his mouth closed again.’

Harley chuckled. ‘He was pretty surprised when we all checked weapons on the way in.’

‘You all carry guns?’

‘All the time,’ Harley said matter-of-factly, ‘just like Grace. Hers is just a little bigger, that’s all, a little more obvious.’

‘Jesus Christ.’ Gino shuddered a little, thinking back to when they’d first walked into the Monkeewrench office, never imagining that they’d been entering an armed camp. ‘You’ve all got permits?’

Mitch snorted softly. ‘You think we’re idiots? You think we’d tell you we carried if we didn’t have permits?’

‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ Magozzi said quietly, looking at each one of them. ‘Apparently all of you live under tight security and carry guns because every single one of you has been looking over your shoulder for the past ten years, thinking this killer was going to track you down. And now that it looks like that might have happened, every one of you is saying, oh no, it’s totally unrelated, it can’t possibly be the same guy. You said cops have tunnel vision? Well, I’m here to tell you we don’t hold a candle to you people in that department.’

Roadrunner was frowning hard, biting his lower lip. ‘But it could be some psycho just playing the game. It’s not impossible. You know how many serial killers are operating in this country at any given moment?’

‘As it happens, I do. Upwards of two hundred. And yes, it’s possible. Anything’s possible. But it would be a hell of a coincidence, so we’re going to be looking at this, and we’re going to need to know a lot more about what happened in Atlanta.’

Annie Belinsky’s eyes shot up to his in a panic. A movement in her lap caught his eye, and he glanced down and saw her wagging a finger back and forth almost imperceptibly, warning him to back off. That wouldn’t have stopped him, but the naked plea in her eyes did.

He hesitated, his eyes still locked on Belinsky’s. ‘We’ll get in touch with you later.’

Her long lashes fluttered closed briefly, then she got up from her chair. ‘So we’re finished here.’

‘For now,’ Magozzi replied. ‘I want numbers, cells, if you’ve got them, for all of you before you leave. Write ’em down, give ’em to Gloria. And I want to know where you’re going to be, today, tonight, tomorrow.’

He and Gino watched silently as the five filed out of the room, then Gino got up and closed the door and turned to face his partner. ‘You’ve got about five seconds to explain to me why you let those people out of here, and then another five to call downstairs and have them stopped before they leave the building.’

‘That’s what you think we should do?’

‘Damn straight that’s what I think we should do. And I’ll tell you why. Because A, I don’t care if the Feds couldn’t pin anything on them in Georgia, one of them was the killer then, and he’s the killer now, because that’s the only thing that makes sense. And B, said killer is going to pick up his gun and go dust somebody at the mall unless we lock him up.’

‘We can’t hold them, and they’re all smart enough to know that.’

‘We could lose them in transport for about a day and a half, at least until we can turn the screws on the FBI and get some straight answers. And then I want to talk to the locals who gave carry permits to a bunch of nutcases like that. Shit, they barely let us carry.’

‘We’re going to get a little more information first.’

‘Oh yeah? From where?’

‘From Annie Belinsky. She’ll be back in a minute.’

Gino opened his mouth just as the door opened behind him. He turned and stared as Annie Belinsky breezed in on a cloud of orange.

‘You tryin’ to catch flies with that thing, sugar?’ She put a long orange nail under Gino’s chin and closed his mouth, then sauntered over to Magozzi and looked straight at him. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘You’re welcome. But it was a conditional reprieve.’

‘I know the rules.’

‘Uh, excuse me for living.’ Gino was scowling. ‘How the hell did you know she was coming back? And what the hell are you talking about? You two got some psychic thing going here or what?’

Annie snagged her purse from where she’d tucked it under her chair and held it aloft with one finger. ‘This is how he knew I was coming back, and as for some psychic connection, well’ – she smiled at Magozzi and her drawl deepened – ‘your friend here’s got some dynamite eyes, haven’t you ever noticed that?’

‘Oh, sure,’ Gino said. ‘Every day I sit across from him and wish I had peepers that special.’

‘Well, you should. He talks with them just as clear as snowmelt runnin’ into a creek, and that’s how we made our agreement. He lived up to his part, now I’m here to give him my tit for his tat.’

Gino blinked several times, rapidly, then decided not to touch that one.

Annie sighed sharply, all business now, and the drawl faded a bit as the tempo of her speech increased. ‘I’ve got about five minutes before one of them figures I’ve been spirited away to the drunk tank or something and comes runnin’ to save me, so tell me what you want to know about Atlanta.’

‘I want to know what you didn’t want me to ask Ms MacBride.’

‘Well.’ She took a breath, let it out slowly. ‘That would be just about everything. For starters, the Atlanta murders were totally different than what’s going down here, which is one of the reasons we aren’t thinking it’s the same killer. I don’t have to tell you how rare it is for a serial killer to change the way he kills; in particular, the weapon he uses.’

‘It could happen.’

‘Yes, of course it could,’ she said impatiently, ‘but rarely, like I said. Especially when there’s some sort of ritual involved, which seemed to be the case in Atlanta. That animal used an X-Acto knife.’

‘I don’t remember reading about that,’ Gino said.

‘It was one of the things the cops held back. He cut their Achilles tendons first, so they couldn’t get away . . .’

Oh Jesus, Magozzi thought, feeling sick. That’s why she always wears the boots.

‘ . . . and then he slashed the femoral arteries. They bled out. It took a while.’

‘Christ.’ Gino looked a full shade paler than he had a minute ago.

‘Grace found Kathy and Daniella – those were her roommates – when she came back to her room after a night out. She was a smart girl. She didn’t go in. Just opened the door, turned on the light, then ran like hell. But there was a lot of blood, and she had to have seen that.’

‘Shit,’ Gino grumbled. ‘That would have put me right in a rubber room.’

Annie looked at him. ‘She had a tough childhood. It made her strong. And the Valium didn’t hurt either. The school brought in a psychiatrist, and he put her on what he called a maintenance dose.’

‘Why the hell didn’t she just pack up and leave?’ Magozzi asked. ‘I would have.’

‘And go where? Back to a string of foster homes that had been their own nightmares? We were all the family any of us had, and we stayed together.’ She looked off to the side briefly, frowning. ‘A better question is why the rest of us were so goddamned stupid we didn’t drag her out of there right then, before the other murders. We’ve been kicking ourselves for that ever since, but none of us knew what was coming.’ She took another deep breath and dug in her purse for a cigarette and lighter. ‘I’m going to smoke in a government building, fellas. You want to stop me, you’re going to have to wrestle me to the ground.’