Magozzi nodded, pushed to his feet. ‘It’s going to take a while. You keeping an eye on her?’
‘You bet your white ass I am.’
It took a long time for Grace to answer the door. He listened to the metallic thunks of all the dead bolts sliding back, and then she opened the door a crack and looked out.
Her dark hair was loose and tousled, weeping around her shoulders, and it hurt him to look into her eyes. She was wearing the white bathrobe, which was all wrong for this time of day. The outline of the Sig bulged in her pocket. He wondered if she’d ever be able to put it away.
‘Can I come in?’ he asked, and he was about to say that there were things he needed to tell her, things that might help, that maybe he could help if she’d just give him half a chance –
She just stood there looking at him, and he couldn’t read her eyes, but he had a fearful flashback to the night she’d slammed the door behind him, because he was a cop, because they always fought, because he was inextricably linked to a nightmare she couldn’t put behind her.
Let her go, he told himself.
Yeah, right.
‘I’m not leaving, Grace.’
Her eyebrows shifted up a notch.
‘I’m not. I won’t do it. I’m not leaving until you talk to me, and if you won’t let me in, I’ll just sit out here on your front step until I’m a hundred years old. You’ll get ticketed for littering.’
She tipped her head sideways a little, no more than an inch, but something in her eyes changed, as if maybe there was a small, small smile somewhere inside her head that might, in time, make it outside to her mouth.
‘Come on in, Magozzi.’
She took his hand and led him inside, leaving the door wide open behind them.
An exclusive extract from
Live Bait
The new thriller by
P. J. Tracy
Published June 2004
1
It was just after sunrise and still raining when Lily found her husband’s body. He was lying faceup on the asphalt apron in front of the greenhouse, eyes and mouth open, collecting rainwater.
Even dead, he looked quite handsome in this position, gravity pulling back the loose, wrinkled skin of his face, smoothing away eighty-four years of pain and smiles and worries.
Lily stood over him for a moment, wincing when the raindrops plopped noisily onto his eyes.
I hate eyedrops.
Morey, hold still. Stop blinking.
Stop blinking, she says, while she pours chemicals into my eyes.
Hush. It’s not chemicals. Natural tears, see? It says so right on the bottle.
You expect a blind man to read?
A little grain of sand in your eye and suddenly you’re blind. Big, tough guy.
And they’re not natural tears. What do they do? Go to funerals and hold little bottles under crying people? No, they mix chemicals together and call it natural tears. It’s false advertising, is what it is. These are unnatural tears. A little bottle of lies.
Shut up, old man.
This is the thing, Lily. Nothing should pretend to be what it’s not. Everything should have a big label that says what it is so there’s no confusion. Like the fertilizer we used on the bedding plants that year that killed all our ladybugs, what was it called?
Plant So Green.
Right. So it should have been called Plant So Green Ladybug So Dead. Forget the tiny print on the back you can’t read. Real truth in labeling, that’s what we need. This is a good rule. God should follow such a rule.
Morey!
What can I say? He made a big mistake there. Would it have been such a problem for Him to make things look like what they are? I mean, He’s God, right? This is something He could do. Think about it. You’ve got a guy at the door with this great smile and nice face and you let him in and he kills your whole family. This is God’s mistake. Evil should look evil. Then you don’t let it in.
You, of all people, should know it’s not that simple.
It’s exactly that simple.
Lily took a breath, then sat on her heels – a young posture for such an old woman, but her knees were still good, still strong and flexible. She couldn’t get Morey’s eyes to close all the way, and with them open only a slit, he looked sinister. It was the first thing that had frightened Lily in a very long time. She wouldn’t look at them as she pushed back the darkened silver hair the rain had plastered to his skull.
One of her fingers slipped into a hole on the side of his head and she froze. ‘Oh, no,’ she whispered, then rose quickly, wiping her fingers on her overalls.
‘I told you so, Morey,’ she scolded her husband one last time. ‘I told you so.’
2
April in Minnesota was always unpredictable, but once every decade or so, it got downright sadistic, fluctuating wildly between tantalizing promises of spring and the last, angry death throes of a stubborn winter that had no intention of going quietly.
It had been just such a year. Last week, a freak snowstorm had blustered in on what had been the warmest April on record, scaring the hell out of the budding trees and launching statewide discussions of a mass migration to Florida.
But spring had eventually prevailed, and right now she was busy playing kiss-and-make-up, and doing a damn fine job of it. The mercury was pushing seventy-five, the snow-stunned flora had rallied with a shameless explosion of neon green, and best of all, the mother lode of mosquito larvae was still percolating in the lakes and swamps. Giddy, sun-starved Minnesotans were |out in force, cherishing the temporary delusion that the state was actually habitable.
Detective Leo Magozzi was stretched out on a decrepit chaise on his front porch, Sunday paper in one hand, a mug of coffee in the other. He hadn’t forgotten about last week’s snowstorm and he was pragmatic enough to know that it wasn’t too late for another, but there was no point in letting cynicism ruin a perfectly beautiful day. Besides, it was a rare thing when he could practice the sloth he’d always aspired to – homicide detectives’ vacations were always contingent on murderers’ vacations, and murderers seemed to be the hardest-working citizens in the country. But for some inexplicable reason, Minneapolis was enjoying the longest murder-free spell in years. As his partner, Gino Rolseth, had put it so eloquently: Homicide was dead. For the past few months they’d had nothing to do but work cold cases, and if they ever solved all of them, they’d be back on the beat, frisking transvestites and wishing they’d been dentists instead of cops.
Magozzi sipped his coffee and watched as the neighborhood masochists engaged in all manner of personal torture, huffing and puffing and sweating as they raced furiously against a climatic clock that would have them locked indoors again in a few months’ time. They jogged, they Rollerbladed, they ran with their dogs, and celebrated every degree that rose on the thermometer by shedding another article of clothing.
It was one of the things Magozzi loved most about Minnesotans. Fat, thin, muscled, or flabby, there were no self-conscious people in this state when the weather got warm, and by the time you got a nice day like this one, most of them were half naked. Of course this was not always a good thing, certainly not in the case of Jim, his extremely hirsute next-door neighbor. You could never be really sure if Jim were wearing a shirt or not. He was out there now, possibly shirtless, possibly not, hard at work preparing the flower beds that would put him in pole position for next month’s Beautiful Gardens of the Twin Cities Tour. If Jim was trying to shame Magozzi into being a better homeowner, it wasn’t going to work.