about them, and only about them. Magozzi envied him so much it hurt.
34
Sheriff Halloran finally got through to Detective Leo Magozzi at 8 P.M., and the only reason he connected at all was because he’d threatened to lay an obstruction of justice charge on some overly protective secretary who was ten times scarier than Sharon.
‘That is such a load of bullshit,’ she’d told him.
‘I know, but I’m desperate.’
For some reason that made her laugh, and now he had the man himself on the phone. He sounded genuinely contrite, and genuinely exhausted. ‘Sorry, Sheriff . . . Halloran, is it?’
‘Right. From Kingsford County, Wisconsin.’
‘Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t get back to you, Sheriff. Things have really been hitting the fan here today.’
‘Mall of America. I heard it on the news, and I’ll try to be quick . . .’
‘Wait a minute. Kingsford County. Oh, man, son of a bitch I am sorry. You’re the one who lost a man this week, aren’t you?’
‘Deputy Daniel Peltier,’ Halloran said, and then for some reason he added, ‘Danny.’
‘I want you to know all of us here were really sorry to hear about that. Hell of a thing, losing a man that way.’
‘Hell of a thing to lose a man any way.’
‘I hear you. And listen, I can’t believe you didn’t get a call from the chief, but I know we’re sending a car for the service . . .’
‘I did hear from your chief, and we appreciate it. That’s not why I’m calling, Detective Magozzi.’
‘Oh?’
‘The thing is, I got your name from the Mother Superior at Saint Peter’s School in New York.’
The detective was silent for so long Halloran could hear snatches of a half dozen urgent conversations in the background.
‘Detective Magozzi? You still there?’
‘Yeah. Sorry. You caught me a little off guard. I’ve just been trying to think what to make of that. May I ask why you had a conversation with the people at Saint Peter’s today?’
Halloran released a long, slow breath, the way he did just before he eased back on the trigger at the firing range. ‘We had a double homicide here the day Deputy Peltier was killed.’
‘Yeah, the old couple in the church. I read about it. Just a sec.’ He covered the mouthpiece and raised his voice. ‘Could you people hold it down, please?’ As far as Halloran could tell, the background noise didn’t diminish much. ‘Sorry, Sheriff. You were saying?’
‘I’ll make it real short, Detective. Our only lead on a suspect in that double homicide led us straight to that school, and when we called there this morning and found out you had called them, too . . .’
Someone on the Minneapolis end was hollering about a pizza, and Magozzi didn’t even bother to cover the mouthpiece this time, he just yelled, ‘GODDAMNIT, SHUT THE FUCK UP!’
And then there was total silence on both ends.
‘Excuse the language, Sheriff.’
Halloran smiled. ‘No problem. Sounds like every movie about city cops I ever saw.’
‘Yeah, well, they weren’t filmed in this area code. I’ve got a chief who loves to lecture on the deterioration of the English language as a moral indicator of the decline of civilization. So you think your killer had ties to that school.’
‘Maybe. It’s a long story.’
‘Tell you what. I’m caught out in the main room here, and this place is a zoo tonight. Let me get to someplace quiet and call you back.’
‘This is pretty much a shot in the dark, Detective. We’ve got nothing solid that would suggest what we’re dealing with is in any way connected to your murders. The coincidence bothered us, though.’
‘I’d like to hear what you’ve got.’
‘I’ll wait for your call.’
‘So what was that about?’ Gino asked, biting the end off of a huge piece of pepperoni pizza, catching a hanging string of mozzarella with his tongue.
‘I don’t know. Could be just a weird coincidence. Come on.’ Magozzi pushed himself up from his chair and started weaving through the desks toward an interview room.
Gino followed, tomato sauce plopping to the floor behind him in a bloody trail. ‘Cops don’t believe in coincidence. I heard it on “Law and Order.” ’
‘Well then, it must be true. Remember that old couple killed in a church in Wisconsin earlier this week?’
‘Sure I remember. Deputy walked into their house later and got blown away by a rigged shotgun. Survivalists or something. Don’t you want a piece of this? It ain’t Angela’s, but it ain’t bad.’
‘No thanks. That was the sheriff over there. Says they traced a suspect to Saint Peter’s School in New York.’
Gino stopped walking. ‘
Gino kept checking in at the small interview room where Magozzi was talking to Halloran and by the time he’d hung up, Gino looked like he was ready to climb the walls. ‘Well?’
Magozzi propped his feet up on a chair and stared at the scuffed suede toes of his black Hush Puppies. ‘Weird stuff, Gino.’
‘How weird?’
‘Weird enough so that Sheriff Halloran is driving over here sometime tonight.’
‘So who’s the suspect he traced to Saint Peter’s School?’
‘The old couple’s kid. Apparently they dumped him there when he was five, never came back. That was twenty-six years ago.’
Gino closed the door on the noise from the homicide room and just stood there for a minute, trying to get his head around parents who could abandon a child. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen it a hundred times before; he just never could get used to it.
Magozzi was looking at him. ‘The kid was a hermaphrodite, Gino.’
‘Wha-at?’
Magozzi nodded. ‘Boy and girl, all at once. Halloran talked to the doc who delivered him – or her – and he said the parents were religious freaks, figured the kid was God’s punishment or some crap like that. They refused the surgery that would have made the kid one or the other. God knows what the first five years of his life were like. Eventually they dropped him at Saint Peter’s, paid twelve years’ tuition in advance, and just split.’
‘You keep saying “him.” ’
‘He was dressed as a boy when he arrived, so the school treated him as a boy. And named him.’
Gino frowned. ‘What do you mean, they named him?’
Magozzi grabbed a yellow legal pad from the table and started thumbing through his notes, his expression grim. ‘The kid didn’t have a first name when he got there. The Mother Superior told one of Halloran’s people she didn’t think anyone had ever talked to him in his life up to that point – the kid could barely speak. Anyhow, they called him Brian. Brian Bradford.’
Gino looked at the back wall of the spartan room with its single narrow window. ‘You know what the miracle is here? That Sheriff Halloran is even bothering to look for whoever killed these dirtbags. I take it he ran the name.’
‘And got nothing. No hits on any Brian Bradford with his DOB.’
Gino sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. ‘All right. So Halloran’s shooter grows up at this obscure Catholic boarding school in New York, and our shooter lays an e-mail path to that very same school. One-in-a- million odds. One coincidence too many. Let’s find him and have him picked up.’
‘It’s not that easy.’
‘Well, shit, I must be psychic. I knew you were going to say that.’
‘He disappeared when he was sixteen.’
