Magozzi smiled ruefully. ‘And Roadrunner’s one of them.’
‘Yes, he is. Anyway, on the off chance he ever breaks through, there’s probably a thing or two in that file that might give you pause. Might as well hear it from me first.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Another thing the FBI used to get Grace to co-operate. They were going to reopen a dismissed case on one of her friends, make a little trouble if they could.’
‘And that case was . . . ?’
Annie touched the sides of her mouth with a finger to keep her lipstick in line. ‘I stabbed a man to death the year before I entered the U.’ She looked at Gino, whose mouth had dropped open again, and gave him a smile that would have blown a less substantial man away. ‘Flies, sugar,’ she reminded him with a tap under his chin, and then she sashayed out the door.
Grace was waiting for her by the elevator. She was leaning against the wall on one shoulder, looking like a model-turned-cowboy in the long black duster, wearing one of those tiny, knowing smiles that always gave Annie the creeps.
‘You spilled your guts, didn’t you, Annie?’
‘Actually, I spilled your guts, darlin’. And a little bit of mine.’
Grace pushed away from the wall and looked down at the floor, dark hair curtaining the sides of her face. ‘If I’d thought they needed to know everything, I would have told them. I can talk about it now. I’m not going to fall to pieces.’
‘They did need to know everything, if only to keep them on track and off our backs, and there’s no reason on God’s green earth that you should ever have to talk about it. Not to them, not to anyone.’ Annie’s mouth was set in a stubborn line. ‘Damnit. I was getting to like Minneapolis. If that Tommy character gets into that file, our cover’s blown and we’re going to have to leave, start all over again.’
Grace pushed the elevator button, her eyes on the little lights over the door. ‘We did what we could. It’s a waiting game now.’
30
For a full five minutes after Annie Belinsky had left the room, Magozzi and Gino just sat in the chairs that faced the board of victim photos, saying nothing, digesting what she had told them about Atlanta.
‘What are you thinking?’ Magozzi finally asked.
Gino grunted. ‘That I should go out and shoot an FBI agent, just to make myself feel better.’
‘There were cops there, too. You can’t lay it all on the FBI.’
‘Yeah, I know. That’s even worse.’ He turned his head and looked at Magozzi. ‘It doesn’t take MacBride off the suspect list, you know. If anything, it makes her a better pick. It’d be a real kick for a killer, wouldn’t it? Off a bunch of people and have everyone feeling sorry for you, thinking you’re a victim? And there’s another thing that bothers me. If she’s not the killer and she really went through all that shit, you’d think she’d be loony tunes for the rest of her life.’
‘Apparently she was, for a while.’
‘A week. You could fake it for that long standing on your head.’
Magozzi sighed. ‘She didn’t do it, Gino.’
‘You sure you’re not doing your thinking a little south of the border?’
Magozzi leaned back in the chair and rubbed at his eyes. ‘I’m not sure I’m thinking at all. Let’s work it out.’
There was a big old blackboard in the back of the task force room that hadn’t been used in years. Everything was neater now. They used tagboards with digital photos and computer comparison charts and probability charts and graphics that would have made Disney weep. But for Gino Rolseth and Leo Magozzi, there was something about writing stuff down with your own hand that helped the thinking process.
They went to the board now and started diagramming it all out, breathing in the dusty smell of chalk, rubbing their fingers together where all the moisture had been sucked out of their skin.
‘Okay,’ Gino said, stepping back and taking a look. ‘It’s just as goddamned clear as a bell, isn’t it? About ten years ago you’ve got a series of killings at Georgia State, and the Monkeewrench people are in it up to their eyeballs. Now we’ve got a series of killings in Minneapolis and guess who’s here? You know what the odds are that any human being on the planet will be directly affected by a serial killer in his lifetime? And these people hit the jackpot twice. One of them did it. No doubt about it.’
Magozzi looked at the board for a long time. ‘Still doesn’t make sense that one of them would want to ruin their own company.’
‘Excuse me.’ Gino rolled his eyes. ‘But you gotta assume whoever dresses up a girl, hangs her on a cemetery statue, then shoots her in the head isn’t exactly taking the elevator all the way to the top floor. Besides, every one of them’s got enough money stashed to last a lifetime. So they lose the company. So what? Ain’t like they’re gonna be homeless.’
Magozzi looked at the list of Georgia killings, then the list of Minneapolis killings, lines connecting all of them to the five people who had just been in this room. ‘What’s the motive?’
‘Hell, I don’t know. One of them doesn’t like the direction the company’s going – this game was a big jump from the little birdie cartoons they were programming for the kindergarten crowd, you know . . .’
‘Mitch Cross doesn’t seem to like the game much. He wouldn’t even go to the photo shoot in the cemetery, remember?’
‘There you go.’
‘Okay,’ Magozzi said. ‘So the game offends Cross’s sensibilities and he thinks it’s a bad business decision. But he’s outvoted, so he snaps and decides to destroy the company he helped build by killing a bunch of people he never met. Kind of an overreaction, don’t you think?’
‘He didn’t just “snap.” The guy’s a maniac. An out-of-control killer. He already offed five people back in Georgia, remember?’
‘What was his motive then?’
Gino pursed his lips and stared at the board, looking for the answer. ‘Don’t know.’
‘And if he’s that out of control how come there’s a ten-year interval between killings?’
Gino pulled at his tie, jaw jutting. ‘Don’t know that, either.’
‘Let’s plug somebody else in. How about Belinsky? She just blithely informed us that she stabbed a man to death before her freshman year in college, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Don’t try to break my heart here, Leo. You’re just going after her because I went after MacBride.’ He took a step back from the board and scrubbed at the patch of whiskers he’d missed. ‘Truth is, I don’t really like either one of them, sexist pig that I am. I’ve had it in my head right from the start that it’s a man. What about the other two? Mutt and Jeff?’
‘Nothing jumped out in what Tommy dug up on them from the last ten years. Aside from the fact that Roadrunner sees a shrink twice a week and Harley has a subscription to Soldier of Fortune.’
‘Soldier of Fortune, huh? That’s scary.’
‘He gets Architectural Digest, too. That’s scarier yet.’ Magozzi went to the front desk and brought back the file on the Monkeewrench partners Tommy Espinoza had left on his desk the night before. ‘I gave it a quick read-through, but nothing popped for me either. The short and sweet is that Harley Davidson turns out to be quite the bon vivant. Second lowest net worth, after Belinsky. Expensive taste, patron of the arts, wine connoisseur . . .’
‘You’ve gotta be kidding.’
‘See for yourself. Spends money like a drunken sailor. Has about five million in classic motorcycles stashed in the garage of his little ten-thousand-square-foot house and his dining-out expenses would pay our salaries.’
‘That’s obscene.’ Gino sat down and started pawing through the printout on Harley. ‘Holy shit. A hundred and fifteen thousand dollars on Bordeaux futures last month? What the hell is a Bordeaux future?’