Magozzi held her gaze because she seemed to be demanding that. Everyone else was looking down at their laps or the floor or their hands, places you look when you want to distance yourself from what’s going on around you. After what seemed like a decent interval, if such a thing were possible at all, he asked her, ‘What about this group? Were you all friends at that point?’
She nodded, lips curved slightly in a knowing smile that held no humor. ‘More than friends. We were family. And we still are. And yes, the FBI looked at all of us . . .’
‘With a magnifying glass,’ Harley put in. His face was flushed and his tone was sharp, bitter. ‘And don’t think we don’t know what you’re thinking. The cops and the Feds took us down the same road. Either Grace was killing her own friends, or more likely, since none of us ever bought it, one of us was doing it. Broke their hearts when they couldn’t pin it on us, or at least it would have if any of those scumbags had had hearts.’
For the first time Magozzi saw the part of Harley Davidson he wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. He wasn’t just bitter; he was seething with a rage that hadn’t tempered a bit in all these years. He’d seen the same thing in Grace MacBride; a touch of it in all of them, and it made him nervous. They didn’t just mistrust authority; they hated it. He wondered if any or all of them were mad enough to kill. Harley certainly looked like he was. His head was lowered, his hands clenched into fists on his thighs.
The big man took a couple of deep breaths, blowing them out slowly, reining it in. ‘Anyway, the FBI wanted to try another plant, but Grace decided she didn’t want to play their reindeer games anymore, didn’t want to wait around to see if the killer would get to the rest of us. So we disappeared.’ He jerked his head toward Roadrunner. ‘This guy’s the genius who did it. Wiped us all right out. Far as we know, the Feebs were still groping around blind till you sent in Grace’s prints, and for that, Detective, it is my sincerest wish that your balls rot slowly and painfully and then fall off.’
Magozzi smiled a little. ‘The prints piqued the FBI’s interest, all right, and now I see why. They never made an arrest, did they? And Ms MacBride was their only connection –’
‘They were using her as bait.’ Mitch Cross was furious, too, but his anger was colder than Davidson’s, and somehow more disturbing.
‘And now, thanks to you,’ Harley said, ‘they know where we are, they know Grace’s new identity, and all the killer has to do is access their records –’
‘We never put a name on the prints,’ Magozzi interrupted, leaving Harley with his mouth open on his last word. ‘The only people who know they belong to Ms MacBride are in this room, and we’ve got no problem with it staying that way.’
Harley closed his mouth, but they all still eyed Magozzi with suspicion.
‘Okay, just a minute.’ Gino walked over to the front desk and sat behind it, frowning down at the scarred wooden surface. ‘Are you telling me you all just walked away from everything? Three-plus years of college, friends, families . . .’
‘We don’t have families.’ Roadrunner frowned at him as if he were supposed to know that. ‘That’s how we all hooked up in the first place. Everybody on campus went home for holidays, and there we were, darn near the only people eating in the cafeteria. One day we all moved to the same table. Called ourselves the Orphan Club.’ He 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.’