"I do?"
"You were born at Kingsford General, right?"
"Right."
"Then you were printed."
Halloran lifted a pen. "Should I be taking notes?"
"Most hospitals print newborns right in the delivery room. Feet, hands, thumb, something, so they don't send the wrong baby home
with the mother. So what I want to know is, how hard would it be to print a full set off every kid when they were born and put them in some kind of a database?"
"Gee, Bonar, you've got the makings of a despot."
"Do you know how many bodies go unidentified every year? How many families sit around waiting for someone to come home, and all the time they're in the ground somewhere under a John Doe marker?"
Halloran sighed. "I'll take a wild guess here. Nothing came up on the prints, right?"
"Not in AFIS, or anywhere else they let us look. And I don't mind telling you I was pretty surprised that not one of the three had an arrest record. It seems obvious that they were running in a pretty rough crowd, and not one of them did time? That almost defies logic."
Halloran started making folds in the case cover sheet. "Maybe they were just nice young men who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"You're going to have to do some fast talking to convince me that an execution with an automatic rifle was just some kind of unfortunate turn of events." Bonar pulled a flattened Snickers bar out of his pants pocket, ripped it open, and took a huge bite. "Any luck with Missing Persons?"
"Nothing on our sheets. I've got Haggerty posting the photos on the nationwides, for all the good it will do."
Bonar dabbed a fleck of chocolate from his lip with his little finger. "These boys are pretty fresh. Maybe no one's missing them yet."
"Could be. The autopsies might give us a place to start, but that's going to take a while. Doc says the state boys at Wausau are backed up with that multiple on Highway 29."
Bonar sighed and got up to throw his Snickers wrapper in the garbage can. "You want to tell me how we're supposed to solve a triple homicide without knowing who the victims are?"
Halloran went back to folding the paper on his desk. "How many automatic rifles you figure we've got in this neck of the woods, Bonar?"
"Probably one or two more than Fort Bragg."
"And who uses them?"
Bonar thought about that for a minute. "Well, we busted Karl Wildenauer for blasting ducks with one last November."
"Besides Karl."
"Green Bay took a couple of AK-47s in that cocaine bust last week."
Halloran scribbled on a notepad. "Okay. Drug dealers."
Bonar made a face. "Kingsford County may have a few teenagers trying to grow pot in their folks' corn patch every now and again, but I doubt they've got firing squads on retainer. The real serious bad boys usually do their dealing in the cities."
"So maybe it's city business. Maybe this was a body dump, pure and simple. Wouldn't be the first time. How about if we send the morgue shots to some of the narc divisions around the state, maybe even Chicago, see if anybody recognizes them."
"That's an excellent thought."
"Thank you. Now tell me who else uses automatic rifles, just in general."
Bonar rolled his eyes to the ceiling and started rattling them off: "Military, organized crime, militia crackpots, collectors-and we have a fair number of all of those in the Dairy State."
"That's about the same list I came up with, and I'm thinking that if our three victims were involved in any one of those, Milwaukee might be able to help us out with an ID."
"The FBI?"
"And maybe the ATF-I'd be willing to bet they both have lists nobody else gets to see."
"I take it you feel like spending the rest of the weekend jumping through flaming hoops."
"Not particularly. I was hoping we could grease the wheel a little. What about that buddy of yours you used to play poker with? Doesn't his son work for the Feds?"
Bonar clucked his tongue. "Not anymore. Poor kid had some nervous troubles a while back and had to resign. I think he's managing a Dairy Queen in Fond du Lac now."
"Sorry to hear that."
"It's not all bad. We can probably get free ice cream whenever we're in the neighborhood."
"Terrific. In the meantime, let's fax off the morgue shots and prints to the Milwaukee SAC anyhow, cover all our bases."
"Sure, we can go the horse-and-buggy route if you want. Or you could just call Sharon in Minneapolis and tell her to run it through."
Halloran pretended he hadn't heard that and started shuffling through papers on his desk. "What's the SAC's name again? Burt somebody?"
"Eckman."
"That's right. You want to put together a package while I jot him a note?"
Bonar cocked his head curiously. "You've got a direct line to the FBI, and you're not going to use it because ... ?"
Halloran continued sifting through papers urgently until he found a blank fax cover, then began filling it in with a surgeon's concentration. He ignored Bonar for as long as he could, until he was hovering over Halloran's desk like a sadistic Goodyear Blimp.
"Call her, Mike. Purely business."
Halloran laid down his pen very carefully. "Do not try to come up on that kind of crap sideways, Bonar. Sharon and I don't talk anymore, and you know it."
"Yeah, I know it, and it's a damn shame, if you ask me."
"I didn't."
"You're going to have to talk to her sometime. Technically, she's still a Kingsford County Deputy."
"Only until Monday."
"Huh?"
"That's when her leave expires. If she's not at roll call Monday morning, she's out."
That put Bonar right back down in his chair, staring at his old friend across the desk. "Jesus, does she know that?"
Halloran nodded shortly. "Official notification went out a month ago. Certified. She got it."
"You sent her a letter telling her she was out?Aletter!"
"Thirty days' notice in writing. That's the law."
"A phone call might have been nice."
Halloran laid down his pen and looked Bonar in the eyes. "This is the way it is. I've got a department to run; I've got a hole in the roster I've been working around for months, ever since Sharon took her so-called 'temporary leave,' and I've got a phone that rings anytime a deputy of mine takes the trouble to dial the number. Sharon stopped returning my calls months ago, and I got tired of talking to her machine. Now. Do you want to keep riding me about Sharon, or do you want to hear my other idea on how to ID our three sinkers?"
Bonar leaned back and folded his arms across what he could still find of his chest. "I'd really like to keep riding you about Sharon, but if it'll make you happy, I'll listen to your idea first."
IT WAS THE THIRD YEAR the Minneapolis Police Department had sponsored a Fun Fair for the Youth in Crisis Program, and this one promised to be the most successful yet. It was nearly four o'clock already, but the park was still jammed with parents and kids, and most of the cops who weren't on duty were either volunteering at one of the booths or enjoying the festivities with their own children in tow.
Detective Leo Magozzi had just finished his volunteer stint selling hot dogs in the food tent, and now it was time for some real fun. He bought three tickets for the dunk tank from a new hire out of Fraud, politely laughed at his lame"drunk tank" crack, then got in line under the bright August sun with about twenty other people, including Chief Malcherson. Tall, light-haired, and icy-eyed, the man looked far too Nordic to carry off summer wear. It was the first time Magozzi had ever seen the painfully genteel man in anything other than a very expensive suit, and it was a little unsettling. Even the Chief himself seemed slightly at odds in his alien skin of lightweight shirt and slacks, his hand straying every now and then to his tieless collar, as if searching for a missing body part.