Live Bait

Magozzi felt a prickle on the back of his neck. ‘Well, that’s interesting. Loves his fellow man and turns his back on his own son at a time like that? And that’s everybody’s Mr Nice Guy?’

Langer spoke softly. ‘That’s the thing, Magozzi. He really was Mr Nice Guy, and that business with Jack at the funeral was so totally out of character, you just had to wonder…’ He stopped, frowning.

‘What you had to wonder,’ McLaren finished for him; ‘is what the hell did Jack do?’

8

The thing was, Magozzi liked to look at her, and sometimes he couldn’t get past that.

‘You’re staring at me again.’

‘I can’t help it. I’m very superficial.’

Grace MacBride smiled, but only a little. If she had a full-blown, many-toothed smile, Magozzi hadn’t seen it yet. ‘I have a favor to ask.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a big one.’

‘I can handle it.’ And he could, of course. He’d do anything for Grace MacBride, and all he asked in return was a few of these nights every now and then, when they’d sit at her kitchen table and drink wine and talk about nothing in particular while he looked at her black hair and blue eyes and dreamed of things that might be, if only he could be patient long enough.

‘I want you to look in on Jackson.’

Oh, now that wasn’t good. Jackson was a foster kid who lived down the block from Grace, and he would only need looking in on if Grace were pla

Magozzi decided to be strong and silent and pretend he didn’t care, but then he opened his mouth and the truth fell out. ‘Grace, you can’t leave. I’ve got this whole seduction plan going.’

Another little smile. ‘This is a seduction? Six months and you’ve never even tried to kiss me.’

‘It’s a long-term plan. Besides, you weren’t ready for that yet.’

She reached across the table and touched his hand then, and Magozzi froze. With only a very few exceptions, Grace never touched people if she could avoid it. Oh, she’d grab your hand and pull you toward something she wanted you to see, but to touch simply for the sake of making contact – that was a rare thing. ‘Everything’s ready, Magozzi. We’ve been working on it for months. And now Arizona has something for us.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Grace, no one from Mi

‘Five women missing from the same small town in the past three years, and all they’ve got is a mountain of paperwork. It’s made to order for the new software program.’

Magozzi felt a sudden, unexpected rush of anger coloring his face, and turned his head so she wouldn’t see it. Grace MacBride had spent half her short life on the run from murderers, and what did she do when she was finally safe? Damn fool looked high and low for another murderer, then ran right toward him. She had this bizarre notion that confronting your demons was theraputic, which made a lot of sense when you were dealing with something like fear of flying, and no sense at all when your demons were armed and dangerous and probably insane.

‘The back of your neck is really red, Magozzi.’

He turned and looked at her, struggling to keep his voice even. ‘There is absolutely no reason for you to go there. Your program can crunch all the information from here.’

‘Magozzi. The five investigations have generated thousands of pages of paper and hundreds of tips, with new information coming in every day, and not a scrap of it is on computer. It would take a month just to transmit everything.’

‘So take a month.’

She shook her head once, sending waves of black hair swinging over her shoulders. It was an intentional distraction, he thought. He shouldn’t have told her he was superficial. ‘We don’t have that kind of time. This guy takes a woman every seven months, like clockwork. It’s been six months since the last one.’

Magozzi thought about slamming his fist down on the table. It seemed like such an Italian thing to do, but he just couldn’t see himself doing it. Apparently the gesticulation gene had passed him by on its hereditary journey. ‘You want to tell me how the hell you managed to find a police department in this country that isn’t computerized?’

Grace put her chin in her hand and looked at him. ‘You have no idea how many of those are out there. This one is a four-man office, one of those is the chief, and even he does double duty on patrol.’

Damnit, he hated it when she had good answers for every question. ‘Okay, then where are the State boys? The FBI? The Texas Rangers? Whoever the hell fills in down there when they’ve got a serial going?’

Grace made a face. ‘The Feds and the State were in it big-time at the begi

Magozzi felt the first stab of hope. ‘So if there are no bodies, what makes them so certain they have a series of homicides at all? Runaways run, after all. It’s what they do. Maybe they’re still all out there.’

Grace was getting impatient. ‘That’s exactly the stone wall the chief is ru

And with that sentence, Magozzi felt himself lose the battle before it ever really began. Grace wasn’t ru

‘This is the kind of case where the new software could really make a difference.’

Magozzi tried not to look miserable, because he had a vague idea that misery probably wasn’t macho. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t known this day was coming. Grace and her three partners in computer wizardry had been knocking themselves out since last October, working on the new program, getting ready to take it on the road, and now that the news was out, Arizona was just the begi

He’d seen the article in a couple of the recent issues of law enforcement magazines that hit just about every department in the country, and couldn’t imagine a single cop who wouldn’t jump all over it, especially since the service wouldn’t cost them a dime.

The FLEE program was basically a computerized detective. It sca

Grace had explained the technical side to him once – he’d walked away with a monster headache. Magozzi could get around a keyboard pretty well, but what went on inside a hard drive made about as much sense to him as waving a wand over a kettleful of toads’ eyes. Finally, she’d made it simple.

Look at it this way, Magozzi. Say you have a victim who wrote a check to some antique dealer up north a few months earlier. And say on that day a deliveryman with a record of minor assault drops a load at the antique store. The program will tell you that in minutes, and you can take a closer look at the man. Now a good detective with a lot of free time might make the same co