‘Nothing like that.’ Becky Gilbert tipped her head curiously. ‘Homicide. Is this about his father?’

‘Yes. We needed to ask Jack a few more questions.’

Becky Gilbert’s outright anger at her husband seemed to dissipate, like a teakettle steaming itself dry, but bitterness lingered in her eyes. ‘That was a terrible thing.’

‘Did Jack talk to you about his father’s murder?’ Magozzi asked.

She shook her head. ‘Jack never talked about his father, period. By the time we met, they weren’t on speaking terms. I thought it might be a painful subject, so I never brought it up.’

Magozzi looked at this woman who so clearly belonged in this suburb, who so clearly wanted to be here, and thought maybe she hadn’t really been all that considerate of her husband’s feelings; maybe she just had no use for an elderly Jewish couple who lived in Uptown.

‘Do you know what caused the rift between Jack and his father?’

‘I have no idea, Detective. He never chose to share that information with me.’

And you didn’t ask, Magozzi thought.

He ran into Chief Boyd’s genial smile halfway down the driveway.

‘Detective Magozzi. Did you learn anything that might connect to your Uptown cases?’

‘Not unless Ballistics comes up with something. We’d really appreciate a heads-up when you get some results, Chief.’

‘I can do better than that. We don’t send those folks at the lab much business, and I’m guessing you might have a little more pull than we do.’ He held up a large sealed pouch with a chain of custody log tucked into a plastic insert. ‘One Smith & Wesson 9-mm, eleven casings, and nine slugs. I was hoping you might put these in for us.’

Magozzi grinned at him. ‘And I was hoping you’d say that. Saved me the trouble of asking.’ He pulled out the evidence log sheet, braced it on his knee, and started to sign.

‘The elderly woman in Uptown was shot with a 9-mm, if I remember correctly,’ Chief Boyd said casually.

And so was Ben Schuler, Magozzi thought, but there was no reason to put that information on the table just yet. ‘That’s right.’

‘So you’ll probably be getting some answers on the gun in that pouch pretty soon.’

Magozzi straightened and looked at him. ‘There are a lot of 9-mm’s out there, Chief Boyd.’

‘I know that. And I’m really anxious to hear that the one we took from Mr Gilbert hasn’t killed anybody.’

‘I’ll call you myself, the minute I hear. We should have something today.’

They walked together down to the street, where Magozzi paused and looked over at the news satellite vans. When the reporters and cameramen scattered around the trucks saw Chief Boyd and Magozzi, they converged in a swarm, cameras running, microphones waving, reporters calling out questions. They all moved en masse toward the curb, then stopped as if the ridge of concrete were the Great Wall of China.

Magozzi looked over at the chief, who was waving congenially at the press. ‘You have an invisible fence down there? One of those electric things they use on dogs?’

The chief kept waving like a doped-up prom queen. ‘Why on earth would we need one of those?’

‘Gee, I don’t know. In the city, the media steamrolls pretty much anywhere it wants to go. I’ve turned tail and run a couple times myself.’

The chief chuckled. ‘The street’s public property. They have as much right to be there as anyone else. But the minute they step up on that curb, they’re trespassers and they go to jail.’

Magozzi snorted. ‘Yeah, right.’

‘We told them all that when they arrived, but there was this really attractive young woman from Channel Ten – a little pushy, though – who trotted right after me on the way up Jack’s driveway.’

‘That would be Kristin Keller, the anchor, and the samurai sword in my side.’

‘Could have been. Don’t watch the news much. Anyway, the minute we cuffed her and put her in a car, the others backed off in a hurry.’

Magozzi turned to him in amazement. ‘You arrested Kristin Keller?’

‘I guess.’

Magozzi tried to remain professional, but he just couldn’t manage it. A shit-eating grin nearly broke open his face. ‘Chief Boyd, you are the man.’

‘That’s what I told them.’

27

Grace MacBride was in her home office: a narrow, wooden-floored space that looked more like a dead-end hallway than a room. Several computers lined the desk-high counter that stretched the full length of one wall, and she rolled from one to the other in her wheeled chair, checking the monitors, tweaking command lines, cursing the flood of useless information that clogged the Net’s public-domain sites. It was easier to hack into any protected site than it was to sort through the drivel jamming the public search engines, and it was time she started to do just that, because this was taking much too long.

She’d plugged Morey Gilbert’s and Rose Kleber’s names into the new software program first thing yesterday, and added Ben Schuler’s name when Magozzi called her last night, but after hours of sifting through the legitimately accessible databases, the only link the program had found between the three was a tendency to shop at the same local grocery. As did everyone else in that neighborhood. It was possible, she supposed, that there was no extraordinary connection to be found – but Magozzi and Gino weren’t thinking that way, and she trusted their instincts.

She scowled at the unremarkable grocery store revelation the program had thought worthy of an asterisk, then balled up the paper and tossed it to one side. ‘This is nonsense,’ she said aloud.

Grace had tried to be legal for months now, breaking through the fire walls of the truly off-limits sites only when it was absolutely, positively necessary. This feeble attempt at walking the computerized equivalent of the straight-and-narrow was a private, silent nod of respect and gratitude to Magozzi and the other cops who had finally ended the reality of her years of terror, if not the haunting, lingering aftereffects. Then again, she rationalized, it was cops of another sort who had put her in jeopardy in the first place, and by respecting Magozzi’s dogged adherence to law, wasn’t she also respecting theirs?

It took only moments to reconfigure one computer’s operating system and initiate the search parameters for bank and phone records for the three victims. Bank and phone company sites were fair game as far as Grace was concerned. Bastards sold every detail of their customers’ lives to the highest bidder, then got all self-righteous and privacy oriented when the cops asked for information. It didn’t make sense to her that the police had to have a warrant and the telemarketers didn’t, so she broke into those sites regularly and gleefully. Besides, Magozzi knew damn well she was going to do this when he asked for her help, whether it was spoken aloud or not.

The other sites she was about to access – the IRS, the INS, the FBI – were a little dicier to justify, but that didn’t slow the speed of her fingers as she rolled down to the big IBM and happily started clattering away on the keyboard. She was still pissed at the FBI, and sometimes she hacked into their sites for no particular reason other than pure spite. But this was different. This time she was doing it for Magozzi. Not that she’d tell him, of course. No reason to torment the man with personal knowledge of computer crime.

The phone rang just as her printer began spitting out little droplets of ink in the shape of asterisks. Grace picked up, smiled when she heard country music and raucous laughter in the background. ‘Hey, Annie. What are you doing in a bar in the morning?’

A warm, syrupy drawl answered her. ‘I am not in a bar, I am in a cantina, and they have the best huevos rancheros in town.’

‘It sounds like a bar.’