‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Oh.’

‘Look at this way, Magozzi. You’ve got legal access to most of this information already at two of the crime scenes. All you have to do is go through every single sheet of paper in Rose Kleber’s and Ben Schuler’s houses and compare them all, and then in a couple of weeks you’ll know what I know right now.’

‘Okay, Grace. Point taken. I’m listening.’

‘All three of your victims – Morey Gilbert, Rose Kleber, and Ben Schuler – spent a lot of money on plane tickets. As soon as I made that connection, I looped their records into the airline databases and found out they took a lot of trips together. And I mean a lot. Same planes, adjacent seats, same destinations, same dates.’

‘What kind of trips? You mean like vacations? Senior tours, that sort of thing?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘So where’d they go?’

Magozzi sat and listened for a second, his brow furrowed at first, then slowly clearing. ‘Wait a second. I’ve got to change phones. I’m going to put you on hold, okay?’

Gino looked up when Magozzi jumped out of his chair and held his own phone against his chest. ‘What’s up?’

‘Maybe everything,’ Magozzi threw over his shoulder as he made a beeline for Langer’s desk.

Gino said a few words into the phone, hung up, and hurried after him.

Magozzi swooped in on a startled Langer, grabbed his phone, and punched the red blinking button. ‘Grace, you still there? Hang on… Langer, give me the sheet with the Interpol hits.’

Gino heard the undercurrent of excitement in his partner’s voice; saw the tightness in his face, and moved to look over his shoulder while Magozzi bent over the desk, a pen poised over the paper Langer had just shoved in front of him.

‘Okay, Grace. Give them to me again.’ And then he put pen to paper while Gino and Langer watched.

‘What’s going on?’ McLaren whispered, rolling his chair over from his own desk, closing in on Magozzi’s other side. Langer shrugged, so McLaren watched Magozzi write, his red brows furrowing more with every stroke of the pen.

He was circling the cities of the Interpol killings – London, Milan, and then Geneva, and all the rest – and next to each of them he printed ‘MRB’ and a series of numbers. ‘Got it,’ he said into the phone. ‘Thanks, Grace. I’m going to have to get back to you.’

Gino was poking a fat finger at what Magozzi had written on the paper. ‘What is this? What’s MRB?’

Magozzi took the pen and checked off the letters one by one. ‘Morey. Rose. Ben. Grace found some flights our victims took together. She started rattling off the destinations, and they rang a bell.’ He nodded at the paper. ‘Those are the trips. The numbers are dates. They were in and out of those cities within twenty-four hours of each Interpol murder.’

No one said anything for a moment. Gino was rubbing his forehead, massaging his brain. ‘That’s a hell of a coincidence, isn’t it?’

‘I’d say so. Especially when the trips are so short. Who goes to Paris for a day and a half?’

‘Business travelers?’ Langer suggested.

Magozzi’s lips tightened. ‘Maybe if their business is contract killing. These people made six trips to six cities on the exact days that your Interpol murders went down.’

Gino wrinkled up his face. ‘That’s really weird.’

‘It’s a little more than weird. Looks to me like we just jumped from coincidence to circumstantial evidence.’

McLaren looked at him in disbelief. ‘Do you hear what you’re saying, Magozzi? That we’ve got a ring of geriatric assassins living in Uptown. That’s a little too far out there, even for me. You couldn’t sell that to Hollywood.’

Magozzi looked to Gino, who was scowling hard, working every one of his brain cells. ‘I hear you, Leo, and you know I like an off-the-wall theory as much as the next guy, but Jesus. Saint Gilbert whacking people in Europe? Grandma Kleber in her little old orthopedic shoes hitting the cobblestones after she caps somebody? I mean, what are we saying here? That these people hit sixty-five and decided to supplement their retirement with a little murder-for-hire sideline?’

Langer spoke quietly. ‘Morey Gilbert would be absolutely incapable of such a thing. You didn’t know him, Magozzi.’

‘Maybe nobody did.’

‘There has to be another explanation,’ Langer persisted.

‘And we’ll keep looking for that. But come on, Langer. You can’t close your eyes to the obvious just because you don’t want it to be true.’

Langer went still, replaying that sentence over and over again in his mind, because it was a perfect summary of what he’d been doing for the past year – closing his eyes, keeping the secret, trying to pretend it had never happened because he wanted so desperately for that to be true.

McLaren wouldn’t give it up. ‘Langer’s right. I don’t know about the other two, but I did know Morey Gilbert, and that man freaked when a ladybug died. No way he’d kill anybody. Besides, just because they were in those cities doesn’t mean they killed anybody. Say I take a trip to Chicago Friday. What do you think the odds are that somebody’s gonna get murdered in Chicago on a Friday night? But that sure as hell doesn’t mean I did it.’

Magozzi smiled a little to pacify McLaren, who had obviously been more attached to Morey than he realized. ‘Maybe not one trip and one murder, but six? We have to look at it, McLaren.’

That took the wind out of McLaren’s sails, but only for a moment. ‘This is crazy.’ He flapped his arms. ‘It doesn’t make sense. The Interpol killings go back what, fifteen years? That means these people were in their seventies when they popped the first one. Who waits until he’s old to decide he’s going to be a hit man?’

‘Maybe that wasn’t their first kill, McLaren,’ Magozzi said, and everyone went silent. ‘Grace says they made a lot of other trips before that year, and a lot more since. Some of them overseas, some domestic, some to Mexico, Canada – all of them short, a couple less than twenty-four hours. Grace is faxing what she’s got so far, then we’ll make some calls, see if we can tie those trips to murders, too.’

‘Jesus,’ Gino said. ‘How many more trips were there?’

‘Besides the Interpol cities?’ Magozzi blew out a breath. ‘Over a dozen in the past decade that all three of them made together. She’s still tracking. Computer records only go back so far, so we may never know the full number.’

Langer sighed, leaned back in his chair, and looked wearily at the ceiling. ‘I don’t know. None of these people were rich. Where’s the money?’

Magozzi shrugged. ‘Offshore, Swiss accounts, buried in Rose Kleber’s garden, who knows? Just because we haven’t found it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.’

‘Okay, fine.’ McLaren folded his arms irritably. ‘I’ll play your silly game. You think Morey and his friends were killers because they were in the same cities as our Interpol murders. Well, the Interpol victims were all killed with the same.45 that shot Arlen Fischer. So that means your victims killed our victim. And they didn’t just kill this one; they tortured him.’

‘Well, that part makes sense,’ Gino said. ‘Interpol thinks the Fischer murder was personal anyway, and these people lived in the same neighborhood for years, which means there’s a really good chance Fischer crossed paths with at least one of them at some point. Beyond asking the Gilberts if they knew him, we didn’t go anywhere with that. I don’t know one person who doesn’t want to kill at least one of their neighbors, and let’s face it, if you were killing people all over the world for money, you’ve got a little sociopathic bent going anyway. What’s to stop you from taking care of some personal business with a guy who really pissed you off?’

McLaren kicked at the floor and rolled his chair back to his desk, dropped his chin in his hands. ‘I hate this. I absolutely hate this. I really, really liked Morey Gilbert.’