Play To Kill

Trek- convention high, but it was damn close.'

    Gino frowned. 'They're pulling in that many outsiders for a case that's four months old?'

    Tommy grimaced. 'That's the thing. They found some more videos the sites pulled before they made it to the Web, and they've got bodies to match the film. Five cities across the country so far. They think Cleveland might be just the tip of the iceberg.'

    Gino was uncharacteristically silent as they walked back to their office from Tommy's, a sure sign that he was processing some sort of philosophical revelation. Magozzi, being an expert in the varying degrees of his partner's rare verbal lapses, drew the quick conclusion that this particular soul- searching session was less cognitive and much more reflective than usual. Too bad Magozzi couldn't transfer the same intuition to his relationship with the woman he loved.

    'That was the worst goddamned thing I've ever seen,' Gino finally said.

    'It was bad.'

    'I mean, I've had a car accident vie bleed to death in my arms on scene; I was holding my grandpa's hand when he made his final exit; and you know exactly how many corpses I've helped you clean up over the years. Me and death are on a first-name basis. But, Jesus. We just watched some guy's final nightmare minute of life - on the Web. On the goddamned Web. People are filming this shit. Posting it. Other people are watching it. I don't get it. I just don't get it.'

    'Can't argue with you there, buddy.'

    Gino shook his head irritably. 'It's like the Roman Colosseum. Call me a dreamer, but I thought the human race got over that after two thousand years.'

    We never got over it. Think about it - the Inquisition. Public executions. Genocide every day, somewhere in the world. Terrorists. People can really suck.'

    Gino rolled his eyes. 'Thanks for that uplifting message of hope. Should I just kill myself now?'

    'I don't think that's the solution.'

    'Okay, how about I go kill all the assholes?'

    'Better.'

    They arrived at their desks, and sank into their chairs. Gino immediately withdrew a purloined packet of beef jerky from his suit-coat pocket and began gnawing. 'You know what? I blame this on Hollywood. And the Web. We've got a bunch of kids calling in bomb scares for their fifteen minutes, and now we've got psycho killers posting their carnage on the Web so they can get their fifteen minutes. Celebrity culture gone wild. Everybody wants to be a star. And they don't care how they do it. Can't make the American

Idol cut? Hell, kill somebody and make a movie of it. Jesus. I never thought I'd say this, but, man, just give me a plain old straightforward homicide to solve, because those always make sense in the end.'

    Out of the corner of his eye, Magozzi caught the blinking red light on his phone. 'Gino, I wish you hadn't said that.'

Chapter Four

    Gino was running the electric seat buttons in time to the bass throb of the sound system in the car next to them, and it was driving Magozzi nuts.

    'Do you have to do that?'

    Gino was looking down at his belly. 'I do. This lumbar support thing is amazing. You know it actually pushes your stomach out?'

    'How can you tell?'

    'Gee, thanks, Leo.'

    Magozzi braked at the fourth red light he'd hit on Washington and glared past Gino at the do-ragged dumbo in the car next door. 'Sorry. I don't like river calls. And that kid's radio is driving me nuts.'

    Gino took a look at the jacked car bouncing to the beat next to them, opened his window and waved his badge. 'Sound ordinance, buddy. You're way over. Shut it down now.'

    Magozzi took a breath when the throbbing stopped. 'Thanks.'

    'Not a problem. The little bastard looked like a skinny Eminem, and I hate Eminem. I caught Helen listening to one of his piece-of-shit songs when she was eleven - you ever hear that guy's lyrics?'

    'Not on purpose. They got him out of the hood, though.'

    'Bullshit. He brought the hood out with him, and now the rest of us have to worry about our kids listening to it. Man, when I was growing up all my mom had to do was worry about me running in front of a car. Now you gotta screen the radio, check out every album, every game, every TV show, and this morning I find out we got snuff films on the computer. Christ. Makes you want to uninvent electricity.'

    The light finally changed. Within minutes they were in sight of the Hennepin Avenue suspension bridge. Gino still took Angela and the kids down here three or four times a year to watch the fireworks from the bridge; Magozzi hadn't liked bridges much since the night he'd gone into the Mississippi after two babies whose mother had just tossed them over the rail. The babies had drowned, but not before Magozzi had heard the noises they made. The mother took a dive in a halfhearted suicide attempt, but came through the swim golden, which was more of a miracle than anyone knew, considering that every man in the river that night wanted to push her under and hold her there instead of dragging her out. Sometimes Magozzi still dreamed about killing her, and woke up in a sweat, wondering if he was the only one that close to the edge.

    'Light's green.' Gino rapped a knuckle on the dashboard. 'You know what we ought to do? Drag this out until noon and do a little lunch at St. Anthony on Main. There's a place here that deep-fries cauliflower so even I can eat it.'

    'Jesus, Gino, we're going to look at a body.'

    'It's three hours to lunch. We'll get over it by then.'

    The Mississippi moved like a lady through this part of downtown, taking in the city sights, lapping at the feet of the new Guthrie on one side and the aged bricks of the old flour mills on the other. Until this morning, it had always been Gino's favorite part of Minneapolis.

    'Why do the floaters always wash up in Minneapolis? Can't St. Paul get one for a change?'

    He and Magozzi were standing at the crest of a shallow, wooded embankment that led down to the river. The Parks Department took great care with the green areas down here, frequented primarily by good Minnesotans who took their families on picnics and probably ate grass; but there were a few spots where nature foiled their efforts at judicious pruning and brush clearing, and this was one of them. After dark, a different stratum of society sought out such places, well hidden from the eyes that admired the river views from their million-dollar condos.

    Both men moved slowly down the slope on a path a lot of feet had worn through the tangled trees and brush. Nobody hurried to a death scene. The officers stringing tape behind them said it was a woman, and, in their words, fresh. Yeah, it was totally sexist, but there was a different feeling when the body was female. Magozzi beat himself up more for those, trapped in the macho mind-set that men were supposed to protect women, and dead ones were a personal failure.

    You know what the worst thing is?' Gino grumbled on the way down. 'That there's probably no homicide here; no villain; just another stupid, useless accidental drowning that didn't have to happen.'

    'No homicide ever had to happen, either.'

    Yeah, I get that, but at least with homicide you get somebody you can blame, somebody you can hate. Accidental death? You get to blame the victim, or you get to blame God. That's it. You ask me, that isn't much of a choice.'

    Magozzi squeezed the bridge of his nose, trying to push back one of the headaches Gino always gave him at a crime scene. Twenty hours out of every twenty-four, the man thought of family and food, in that order. But show him a body and all of a sudden he started beating a philosophical drum that boomed in Magozzi's head like a pile driver.

    There was a uniform at the water's edge, standing watch, preserving the scene, trying not to look at the