Gino grunted, obviously unconvinced. ‘Maybe so, but that still doesn’t mean some dirtbag lawyer isn’t going to try to capitalize on it.’
‘Don’t mind him,’ Magozzi said. ‘He’s been this way ever since O.J.’
Sharon started to move dishes aside. ‘You guys mind if I look at the file?’
‘Go for it,’ Magozzi said, handing over one of the heavy boxes.
She lifted the cover and started thumbing through pages very fast. ‘None of your witnesses could pin it down as male or female?’
Gino shook his head. ‘No witnesses at all with the jogger – he was the first one, hit after dark on a trail down by the river. Lots of trees, lots of cover, you would have had to be damn near on top of him to see anything. The second one was the girl on the statue in the cemetery . . .’
Sharon grimaced as she continued flipping through the pages, speed-reading. ‘I read about it. Really spooky.’
‘You should have been there. Would have curled the hair on your balls . . .’ Gino hesitated. ‘Shit, is that sexual harassment?’
Sharon looked up and batted her eyes at him.
‘Anyway, cemetery closes up tight at sundown, and this was in pretty deep. Not a lot of mourners around in the middle of the night. We tracked the victim back to the bus depot, but no joy there. Nobody could even ID her, let alone place her with anybody.’
Magozzi said, ‘There was a maybe with the guy on the riverboat. He was at a local restaurant less than an hour before he was killed. Waitress there put him with someone out on the street after he left, thought it might have been a woman, but hedged when we tried to pin her down. Clothes could have gone either way.’
Gino leaned back in the booth and sighed. ‘So far the only people who saw the shooter for sure were at the mall yesterday – cops, no less – and even they couldn’t nail it down. Whoever it was was all bundled up in one of those big puffy coats with a hood. No way to tell for sure.’
‘Wow.’ Sharon shook her head and sucked air through her teeth. ‘You’ve got four murders and not a single witness. You know how rare that is?’ She tapped the piece of paper she’d been reading. ‘And from the looks of this, the same thing happened in Georgia.’
‘And Wisconsin,’ Halloran said grimly. ‘If this is Brian Bradford, he’s done eleven that we know about, clean as a whistle, and we don’t even know if we’re looking for a man or a woman or both.’
Sharon said, ‘I’d guess woman.’
Magozzi raised his brows. ‘Why?’
‘Just a hunch. He’d want to be whatever his body told him to be, of course, and just because both sets of sex organs were fully developed doesn’t mean the hormone production isn’t prejudiced toward one or the other. More estrogen, he’ll want to be a woman; more testosterone, the other way. But all things being equal, from a psychological standpoint, my guess is he’d want to be the opposite of what his parents chose, and they dropped him at the school dressed as a boy.’
‘Huh.’ Gino pondered that, then looked down his nose at Magozzi. ‘There you go. Probably a woman, and that means probably Grace MacBride, just like I been telling you.’
Bonar’s thick eyebrows twitched together over his nose and seemed to lock in place. Magozzi watched, fascinated, wondering if he’d ever get them apart again. ‘You got a feeling about MacBride?’ Bonar asked Gino, snagging a discarded piece of toast from Sharon’s plate.
‘I don’t know. She’s screwed up enough, if you ask me,’ Gino said. ‘She’s got her house locked up like Bank of America, she carries all the time, and she hates cops.’
‘Sounds like half the people in America so far,’ Halloran noted.
‘And that’s not “screwed up,” anyway,’ Sharon put in. ‘If she weren’t trying to protect herself after what happened to her in Georgia, now that would be suspicious.’
Gino pursed his lips and thought about that. ‘Damn, Leo, you are a stupid son of a bitch. That’s the best argument for MacBride not being the killer I ever heard, and you never thought of it. But you know what? It kind of puts the kibosh on the rest of the geeks. They all thought they were targets of the Georgia killer, so they all carry, too, and apparently have security systems just about as tight as MacBride’s.’
‘But that doesn’t really eliminate anybody, does it?’ Bonar asked. ‘If one of them was the killer, for instance, and the other four were scared, the killer better pretend to be scared, too.’
Gino groaned and dragged his hands down over his face. ‘This just keeps going round and round.’ His cell phone rang and he pulled it out of his pocket. He listened for a second, said, ‘Thanks, David,’ then flipped it closed and gave a thumbs-up. ‘The slugs are a perfect match.’
Everyone took a breath.
‘Goddamn,’ Halloran murmured. ‘It really is the kid. What do you think of that.’
‘And . . .’ Gino got up and started to fish out his wallet, ‘ . . . we got about a zillion pages coming in on the fax from Georgia State.’
‘What’s coming from Georgia?’ Sharon asked.
Magozzi was on his feet, tossing bills on the table. ‘Two lists from Georgia State, about five, six thousand names each. Brian Bradford’s on the admissions list, but not on the freshmen registration list, but the numbers still match up.’
Sharon thought about it for two seconds, then jumped up and started stuffing papers back into the box. ‘He changed his name. Did you check court records?’
‘Yeah, Atlanta did. No record of a Brian Bradford applying for a name change in Georgia. He might not have done it legally. Could have just altered the records at the U.’
She snapped the box cover closed and started digging in her pockets for change. ‘Yeah, maybe. Nothing in New York, either?’
Gino and Magozzi looked at each other for a minute, then Magozzi reached for his cell, punched in Tommy Espinoza’s number, and looked over at Gino while it was ringing. ‘We gotta hire more women.’
Bonar was grinning, patting Sharon on the head while she tried to slap his hand away.
42
Tommy called Magozzi while they were still in the car, heading back to City Hall. New York’s name changes were recorded county by county, not statewide, and some of the counties weren’t computerized that far back. It was going to take some time.
‘Keep at it,’ Magozzi told him.
‘No luck?’ Gino took the corner around City Hall too fast, and then had to do some fancy steering to avoid a Channel Ten camera crew crossing the street. Or maybe he was trying to hit them; Magozzi wasn’t sure.
Magozzi told him what Tommy had said. ‘In the meantime, we’re going to have to do it the hard way. Comparing those two lists, name by name.’
Gino squealed into the parking ramp, checking his rearview mirror to make sure Halloran’s car was still behind him. ‘There, you see? Sharon’s idea about checking New York didn’t do us a bit of good, so we don’t need to hire more women after all.’
‘That’s a relief. We get any more women with guns in this town I’m going to have to move to Florida.’
‘All the women in Florida have guns.’
‘Yeah, but most of them are older than I am. I figure I could outdraw them.’