Play To Kill

leaned forward to bring his face closer to the screen.

    Aubrey stood patiently a few steps away, sweating in the suit, waiting for his look at the screen. He'd been on enough of these runs to know that this was where the scenario ended. Barney would step aside and give him a look at the X-ray of clothes or stuffed animals or whatever was inside, and then it was just a matter of procedure and time before he could strip off the hood and get a breath of good air, or at least as good as the air at the airport ever gets.

    Finally Barney pushed to his feet and stepped aside and

    Aubrey moved in and hunkered down in front of the machine. He looked for a few seconds, then remembered to breathe. 'Sweet Baby Jesus,' he murmured, and Barney nodded.

    'We're going to need the Hazmat suits.'

Chapter Thirty

    Magozzi was staring at the television screen, noticing only peripherally that the phones in Homicide weren't ringing. Apparently people postponed killing each other when there might be a larger, more all- encompassing threat. There was a Ph.D. thesis in here somewhere.

    'Okay, I got the list right here,' McLaren said, rattling a sheet of paper. 'Five bucks to pay, or you don't play. What's in the boxes, boys, what's in the boxes?'

    Gino raised a hand with a fiver. 'Nothing. They're empty.'

    'You sure you want to go that way, Rolseth? Four guys in Vice already bet that way, so if you're right, you have to split the pot. Try to be more creative.'

    'Okay. Porn.'

    'Nice one. And it's all yours. Leo? You in?'

    Yeah. I'm doubling down on a note.'

    'What kind of note?'

    You know, some 'Ha-ha made you look' kind of thing'

    'Whoa. Another nice one. Tinker?'

    Tinker was still staring at the television. 'No thanks. Take a look. They've got the first one from the airport at the detonation site in Rosemount, and there goes the robot.'

    Magozzi closed his eyes. He'd been out to detonation sites with the squad - everybody in the department had after bomb threats had become all too common. He'd watched from behind the steel barrier while the remote- control robot whined up to the dummy bomb, its metallic arms busy, and every face behind the barrier, his own included, was gleaming with sweat. It wasn't a real threat. Everyone there knew there was no bomb inside that container; but the procedure itself was filled with tension, and every man and woman felt it as if it were the real thing.

    There's nothing in the damn boxes,' he grumbled. 'Probably just another stupid kid's prank, like at the mall the other day. The media just gets a hard-on from titillating the public. Makes for good ratings. Problem is, if they keep giving it airtime, it'll keep happening. They're creating a little culture of celebrity-starved psychopaths, just like Chelsea said.'

    Gino turned his head slowly to look at Magozzi. 'Titillating and hard-on in the same sentence, Leo? You're running off the rails.'

    Tinker Lewis had been a Homicide Detective for longer than he cared to remember; a cop for twice as long, and he'd seen this before. Every now and then there was a weird year - who knew why - too many mosquitoes, too few jobs, too many really hot and humid days, or maybe even something odd, like the alignment of the planets or some such crap. He never bothered to wonder why; he only knew that in those years strange things happened. A lot of vandalism, like two weeks ago when twenty cars on a side street in a pleasant neighborhood had all their windows broken out by something like a baseball bat wielded by someone who was really pissed. Kids, probably, raging for reasons you could never understand, using senseless violence as the pointer toward a society they thought had failed them.

    Then there had been the murders. Not a lot of them, over the past few weeks, but they hadn't been pretty. The domestics were more gruesome than usual; the robberies more vicious. And then there was this home-invasion thing. That phrase hadn't even been in his vocabulary a decade ago. What madness prompts your average burglar to intentionally break into a house where people are asleep in their beds? What sadism feeds the need to terrify people you never met while violating their property? What's the problem with doing it like it's always been done? Certainly there was far less risk in breaking into houses when people aren't home, taking what you want and walking away free? Something was changing. Something was different, and it pulled his sad eyes even further down on his face, because it spoke more of evil than simple criminality.

Take your pension. Get out now, Tinker.

    His wife had been telling him that for some time.

    God knew, the pension was good after all these years, and it didn't hurt to be married to one of the country's top heart specialists, who made more money on surgery Monday than he did in a whole year.

He was thinking of all these things as he watched the television; watched the number of boxes adding up. It's just kids, he thought. Getting their rocks off terrorising the whole damn city, just because they could; just because they raged and raged. These days they smashed the windows in twenty cars, broke into houses to scare sleeping families, or maybe, just maybe, they stashed a few suspicious boxes in places that would send a whole city into panic mode. That's what it was. That's what it had to be, because the alternative was unthinkable.

Chapter Thirty-one

    Joe Gebeke was at one of the bathroom sinks splashing water on his face when Magozzi walked in.

    'That was fast. False alarm at the Convention Center?' Magozzi asked, then did a double take when Joe glanced up at him in the mirror. He didn't look so good.

    'We're not finished yet. Not by a long shot.'

    'And they let you come back?'

    Joe braced his arms on the sink and looked at the drain. Water dripped from his chin and made tiny sounds on the porcelain. Finally he straightened, looked around the room, then stepped closer and almost whispered, They sent me back because I haven't finished my recertification for Hazmat yet.'

    Magozzi felt like he was missing something. Between meth labs and chemical spills, Hazmat had gotten a lot of press time, and almost everyone had seen the rigs on the road at one time or another. Leave behind a can of hairspray or a case of wine at the airport, Hazmat was likely to show up, just like it had this morning. Even the media didn't try to hype it up anymore, because eventually the thing that looked like a can of hairspray tested out to be a can of hairspray, leaving a lot of reporters looking like the boy who cried wolf, and a lot of other people pissed because so-called 'breaking news' made them miss their favorite show.

    'Okay…he said to Joe. 'You've got something questionable in the Convention Center box, just like they did at the airport, and Hazmat comes in. Happens all the time. Better safe than sorry, right? So why are you whispering?'

    Joe got red in the face. 'It isn't two boxes, Leo. It's five. At least, it was five the last time I heard. There's a new one at the Mall of America; two more at the Metrodome. Every single box is absolutely identical, and every one of them has a Mason jar in it, you know those things your mom used for pickles and shit?'

    Magozzi nodded.

    'Well, they're all filled with some kind of liquid. Could be water - some sicko's idea of a joke - or it could be nitro, or something a hell of a lot worse. It's going to take a while to find out, because there's something under each jar. Something they took the trouble to wrap in lead sheeting so the X-ray can't penetrate. It's creeping a lot of us out.'

    Magozzi felt his fingers go numb, and wondered where his blood was headed.

    Down the hall in Homicide, Gino switched channels when the one they were watching broke away to a