The Sixth Idea Read online

  “Lydia’s man from the airport,” Gino murmured, and Magozzi nodded.

  “She was right—Spencer was being followed. He was a target.”

  “Yeah, and odds are, Luntz was, too.”

  Grace looked up at Magozzi, her brows tipped in question. “Who’s Luntz?”

  “Wally Luntz. A new friend of Spencer’s. They were going to get together last night, but Luntz took a bullet to the head, too. Right before his house blew up.”

  “The gas explosion in South Minneapolis?”

  “Arson says it’s no accident.”

  Harley spun around in his chair. “Whoa. I think you better start at the beginning.”

  Magozzi and Gino told Grace and Harley about Lydia, about her plane ride with Spencer, his planned meeting with Wally Luntz, and the stunningly realistic sketch of the man Lydia thought was watching Chuck in the airport coffee shop.

  Grace’s face went perfectly still. The only indication that she wasn’t a wax model of a human was the faint, shifting crease between her brows. “That’s a monumental coincidence that two people with such exclusive family histories got seated next to each other on a plane.”

  Magozzi shrugged. “We think that’s all it was—a monumental coincidence. We interviewed her yesterday. She doesn’t know anything, she just showed up at the Chatham to have lunch with Spencer like they’d planned. She had no clue he’d been murdered the night before.”

  “Well, this whole thing is monumentally weird,” Harley said. “Can’t you guys ever get a normal homicide?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “What about the hydrogen bomb stuff? You think there’s anything there?”

  Magozzi shook his head. “It’s been declassified for decades. Besides, that was a long time ago. Nobody’s going to get killed over Cold War artifacts sixty years after the fact.”

  “Yeah. You’re right. Okay, I’m going to put everything you have into the Beast and while that’s working, Grace and I will get Spencer’s website up, and that’s a promise.”

  The Beast was a parallel processing miracle of Monkeewrench design that could sort through massive amounts of data, scour the Web, and find connections humans could easily overlook—if the Pope was connected to a South African penguin, it would eventually find out how. “We really appreciate that.”

  “And send us any new information you get,” Harley said, rising from his chair. “Anything, no matter how insignificant it seems. The Beast has a big appetite and the more we feed it, the faster it works. Kind of like me.”

  Gino bent over and squinted at Grace’s monitor one last time. “Can you run this through facial recognition for us?”

  “We already did. These men don’t exist, at least on the Web.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Alvin Keller had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease a decade ago, and he’d been waiting to die for a very long time. Now he was eighty-seven, almost completely paralyzed, and his ability to speak was worsening by the day. Soon, the doctors told him, he would be unable to swallow, and then, unable to breathe. Decisions would have to be made.

  You should have shot yourself in the head years ago, when you could still raise your hand that high.

  But now it was too late; he couldn’t do it himself, and no one would help him, certainly not his dear wife of sixty years. And that was the basest survival instinct at work—no matter how aware you were that you wouldn’t live to see a cure; how aware you were that a horrendous disease would eventually trap your perfectly cognizant, brilliant mind in such a sorry, degenerating vessel, it was still impossible for him to relinquish life. It was a cruel irony; or perhaps in his case, cosmic punishment for the things he’d done. At least the end was near—that much he knew.

  Alvin had heard that at the end of your life on this earth there would be hallucinations, but he hadn’t ever imagined they would be as vivid as this one. She was a beautiful woman, dressed in fur and jewels, standing in the middle of his living room. Her face remained placid as she reached into her pocket and withdrew a gun.

  Ah! This was an amusing twist, tailored precisely by his own imagination. His beautiful hallucination had suddenly turned into his angel of death: his savior. She knew he welcomed the end—of course she did—for his own mind had conjured her. Alvin let out a halting sigh, closed his eyes, and smiled.

  Eventually he opened his eyes again. The beautiful woman was still there, the imaginary gun was rising in her hand, but behind her was now a man who had appeared as suddenly and silently as she had. He was looking straight at him with a forefinger pressed against his lips.

  Suddenly, the woman’s head exploded, and Alvin felt pieces of something ping against his face. This, he hadn’t expected from a hallucination, nor had he expected the man to sit beside him on the sofa and gently wipe away whatever had settled on his face with a cloth. It all felt so real. He closed his eyes again and heard the male hallucination say, “Bring the van to the back, Vera.”

  • • •

  Vivian Keller’s arthritic joints complained bitterly as she eased out of her old Ford Taurus with a single grocery bag. The cold was the greatest plague to her condition, and on wet, snowy days like this one, it was torture to even get out of bed. But her suffering was nothing compared to poor Alvin’s.

  She entered her tiny kitchen quietly and didn’t announce her arrival, because Alvin was most certainly asleep and she didn’t want to wake him. The medications kept him out of sorts most of the time, and the doctor had told them both that sleep was good.

  She unloaded cans of Campbell’s Scotch Broth and a loaf of bread, and set the soup on the stove to warm so it would be ready for Alvin when he woke up. Then she dutifully washed the can in the sink and removed the labels, not because she cared anything about recycling but because it postponed entering the sad, depressing realm of a husband dying slowly and painfully.

  Finally, she went into the living room, pausing in the doorway to let her eyes adjust. The room was dim with the shades drawn, because the medications made Alvin’s eyes sensitive to light. But she didn’t need much light to see what was on the floor.

  Vivian started screaming.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Gino had just pulled out of Harley’s driveway and was heading west on Summit Avenue when Dispatch called and sent them to a homicide scene in the Longfellow neighborhood.

  “First responder is on scene. One definite homicide, one missing, possibly kidnapped.”

  “Pam, is that you?” Magozzi asked.

  “Yes, Detective. Magozzi, right?”

  “You got it. And we already have one, possibly two connected homicides on our plate. No way we can take on another.”

  “There was just a multiple in Uptown and everybody else is on call-out until they get things sorted. Chief Malcherson wants you to do the preliminary on this one and secure the scene until he can cut somebody loose and assign them. He’ll send your relief in under an hour.”

  “Oh, great,” Gino grumbled, jumping onto the freeway. “My head’s already a mess.”

  An ambulance wailed past Gino and Magozzi as they pulled up to a small one-and-a-half-story brick house in a neighborhood filled with clone structures, erected in the post–World War II boom of returning veterans with modest incomes in need of housing for their new families. Demographically, it was split down the middle, divided between elderly people, many of whom were probably the original occupants of the houses when they’d been new over half a century ago, and young families just starting out in life, drawn in by the reasonable prices of two-bedroom, single-bath real estate. Not exactly a hotbed of homicide.

  Gino squinted through the windshield at an approaching uniform who was trailing crime-scene tape behind him as he finished the job. He looked vaguely familiar and very young, even underneath the concealing bulk of his cold-weather gear. “We know that kid, don’t we?”

>   Magozzi flipped through his mental photo gallery of players from crime scenes past. Unfortunately, the photo gallery didn’t have captions with names. “Looks familiar.”

  Gino rolled down his window. “Afternoon, Officer.”

  “Hi, Detectives. Brady Armand. I was with Officer Bad Heart Bull when we found those kidnapped Indian girls last fall.”

  Gino nodded, pulling the memories front and center. Brady and his partner had found four little girls alive when they’d all expected the opposite. “That was one great day in the middle of a really rotten case.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You were the first responder on this scene?” Gino was scouring the street for other squads and saw none.

  “I called in for backup, but it’s going to be pretty slow and pretty lean, what with the Uptown situation. Sounds messy, and there are a lot of conflicting reports coming in.”

  “Same on our end. We already have two active cases on our docket, so we’re just temps here—Chief Malcherson requested that we do a prelim and preserve the scene until he can pull somebody to take over. What can you tell us?”

  Brady stomped his feet on the snowy sidewalk, trying to keep warm. “We have kind of a strange situation here.”

  Magozzi got out of the car and noticed a curtain flutter closed in the front window of the neighboring house, which was decorated to the nines with outdoor Christmas lights and a massive inflatable snowman that was almost as big as the front yard it inhabited. “Strange how?”

  Brady was consulting his notebook. “Elderly female home-owner—Vivian Keller—returned home from a quick trip to the corner market and found a dead stranger on her living room floor. Her husband, Alvin, is missing and he’s really sick. ALS, I think she said. And that’s about all I could get, because she was pretty much on the verge of hysteria and was having chest pains. You probably saw the ambulance on your way in.”

  Magozzi nodded. “So chances are her husband didn’t go anywhere on his own.”

  “Definitely not, according to the wife. He was almost totally paralyzed.”

  “Any of the neighbors offer up anything?”

  Brady jerked a thumb toward the snowman next door. “An old guy named Knute Viestad came out when I got here. He’s the one who called it in. He was watching TV when he heard Vivian scream, so he called nine-one-one. He thought maybe Alvin had finally given up the ghost, but he’s pretty frail himself, so he stayed put inside just in case it was something else.”

  Smart, Magozzi thought. Because it had been something else.

  “Anyhow, he said he didn’t see or hear anything before that.”

  Gino’s breath made frosty balloons in the frigid air. “We need to find Alvin Keller. Get a BOLO out right now. He’s not just a vulnerable, he’s a witness.”

  “You got it.” Brady headed for his squad at a jog.

  Gino and Magozzi gloved up and took it slow up the front walk of the Keller house and the three concrete steps that led to the front door, which was slightly ajar.

  Magozzi pushed open the door with the familiar dread of viewing yet another dead body. As a young homicide detective, he’d always thought that the dread would mellow eventually, but it never had. Which, in retrospect, was probably a good thing, because it kept the senses honed and on high alert; it helped you notice things you might not if your endocrine system wasn’t gushing adrenaline like Old Faithful gushed water.

  Inside the house, it was dim and breathless and redolent with a pungent artificial air freshener. It was clean and neatly kept, but the furnishings were from another era—the eighties, Magozzi figured—and they showed a lot of wear and tear: a rip in the faded upholstery here, a few dings in a coffee table there, some bald places in the carpet that bore the fairly fresh tracks of a vacuum. It had aged right along with the owners, which made him sad, thinking of Vivian Keller in the hospital and Alvin Keller, who was God only knew where. This had the potential to be a really tragic situation for more than just the baffling corpse on the floor that lay not far from the front door.

  “Holy shit, this is twenty kinds of weird,” Gino said, looking down at the woman. She was fairly young, mid-thirties at most, black pantsuit beneath a fur coat. Diamonds sparkled around her neck. She definitely did not belong in this threadbare world of the Kellers. It was like she’d been dropped here from outer space.

  Gino and Magozzi circled the body, befuddled by the incongruity, then simultaneously crouched down for closer examination. “Entry wound to the back of the head. Small caliber. And lookie here, praise the Lord, we got us some evidence for a change,” Gino said, pointing to a discarded handgun lying on the rug a few feet from the body. “Ruger .22. Just a wild guess, but she probably didn’t shoot herself in the back of the head.”

  Magozzi frowned. “Third-party shooter. Who left their gun behind at a crime scene?”

  “Could be her gun. It’s a nice personal security pocket rocket for a lady of wealth and taste. Ballistics is going to be interesting.” He touched her throat to check for a pulse he knew wouldn’t be there, then started going through her pockets. “Nothing. No ID, no makeup. And look around—there’s no handbag. Women don’t go anywhere without a handbag.”

  “Well, if she was robbed, the robber has an IQ of about four, because she’s wearing a shitload of cash in diamonds alone.”

  Gino pulled back the cuff of one of her fine leather gloves and exposed a bejeweled Swiss watch which racked up the dollar signs on an already expensive inventory of personal effects. “Look at this, Leo. And her clothes sure as hell didn’t come from Target, and that coat is chinchilla. Seventy grand at least. She so doesn’t belong here, so why is she here?”

  “That’s the question of the day.”

  “She’s still wearing her gloves.”

  Magozzi lifted a shoulder, contemplating a small detail when there were so many bigger, mystifying details to worry about. “Yeah. So maybe she just got here before she was shot. Or maybe she wasn’t planning on staying at all, asking for directions or something. Or she had poor circulation, or warts she wanted to keep covered. I think that goes in the pending bin for now. We’ve got bigger questions.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  Magozzi stood up and stepped back, worrying his lower lip with his teeth. “Seriously? Seventy grand for a chinchilla coat?”

  “Oh, yeah. Adjusting for inflation, of course.”

  “Tell me why you know this.”

  “I know this because I used to hang out with Donnie Bergstrom in the fifth grade, and his dad had a bunch of chinchillas in cages in the basement, and they were so soft and cute, we used to go down and play with them until we got yelled at to leave the animals alone. So one day, Donnie and I go downstairs and the chinchillas are all gone. I asked where they went, and Donnie told me his dad killed them when they got big enough, because the pelts were worth a fortune, which explained why Donnie had a big house and a foosball table, and real-live arcade games. I spent the whole night crying my eyes out.”

  “That . . . really sucks.”

  “Not as bad as this sucks, Leo. We’ve got a woman dressed to the nines with a goldmine of swag on her person nobody bothered to take, no signs of sexual assault that I can see, shot to death in the home of an elderly couple, and a possibly kidnapped, terminally ill old man. You want to take a stab at that?”

  Magozzi looked around the small house, reminded again that these were not people of means. “If Alvin Keller was kidnapped, it wasn’t for ransom. Besides, this won’t be our case for long.”

  “Thank God for small favors.”

  Magozzi tipped his head, studying a faded, framed print of the Last Supper on the far wall while he waited for Gino to march out one of his crazy theories, but he wasn’t talking. It was actually disappointing. “Are you speculating or sleeping?”

  “I don’t like the timeline. I mean, how lon
g does it take to go to the corner market?”

  “Probably not very long.”

  “Exactly. So this rich lady pops into an unlikely place. A jealous ex is following her, confronts her in a stranger’s house, then the jealous ex maybe kidnaps the only witness, or kills him, and right now he’s on the way to a body dump, all during the wife’s trip to the store. Yep. Happens all the time in Weirdville.”

  “We don’t really know if she was a stranger. Vivian didn’t know her, but maybe Alvin did. Bottom line, we need to get her ID’d and we need to find out more about Alvin and Vivian Keller.”

  Brady came in through the front door, his cheeks red from the cold. “BOLO is out. Backup is on the way. I’m going to get back out there and start talking to people.”

  “Good work, Brady.” Magozzi looked out the front window and saw a few timid rubberneckers in full-on winter regalia gathering on the sidewalk. “Start running plates on the cars parked on the street, too. Our victim got here somehow.”

  “Sure thing, Detectives.”

  Gino pulled out his cell and started dialing. “I’ll get on the cab companies, see if she was a fare. You’d remember somebody like this lady.”

  While Gino made his call, Magozzi checked in with Hennepin County Medical Center to see how Vivian was doing. The nurse put him on hold, so he wandered around the house, looking for something, anything.

  There were no pictures of kids or grandkids, which probably meant that Vivian and Alvin didn’t have any. There was a curio cabinet in the tiny dining room that had porcelain figurines of cats and dogs, but no signs of any current pets. He found an address book that was in a kitchen cabinet next to an ancient, wall-mounted rotary phone that probably had antique value by now. No answering machine.