Live Bait

‘It has nothing to do with my being happy at this moment.’

‘I know. Tell me about the case.’

‘Actually, there are two cases. Morey Gilbert, the man who owned the nursery, and Rose Kleber, but we don’t have anything to co

‘What about the man they found tied to the train tracks?’

‘Langer and McLaren are working that one. No co

‘All right, two then. And you’ve got a bunch of homicide detectives with no homicides to work, while you and Gino are ru

Magozzi shrugged. ‘It’s a thin co

‘How thin?’

He shifted a little in his chair, suddenly uncomfortable. ‘That’s part of the information we were holding back.’

‘Come on, Magozzi. You want me to plug the names into the new software program, right? See if anything comes up?’

‘Gino and I thought it was worth a shot.’

‘All right, then. You watched that program work your cold cases. You know perfectly well it sorts through hundreds of databases, looking for co

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Grace. Next to Gino, she was the person he trusted most in this world. Hell, he was sitting under a tree with a possibly dangerous bird overhead, wasn’t he? Trusting that Grace MacBride would pull her gun and shoot the thing if it attacked? But violating departmental policy still went against the grain, and Magozzi, to his everlasting dismay, was no rebel.

‘I don’t have days, Magozzi.’ She folded her arms, impatient with him as she always was when he plodded down that narrow path defined by rules. ‘We start loading the computers into the RV day after tomorrow.’

He closed his eyes at the reminder that she was leaving. ‘They both had tattoos on their arms. Morey Gilbert was in Auschwitz, Rose Kleber was in Buchenwald.’

He could feel her eyes on him in the dark; and then he felt them drift away.

Grace was silent for a long time. ‘It could be a horrible coincidence.’

‘Of course it could.’

‘But you don’t think so.’

Magozzi sighed. ‘It’s thin, I told you. I’m reaching here.’

‘You never reach, Magozzi, unless you have nowhere else to go. So what are you thinking? That someone’s killing Jews, or Jews who were in the camps? Which is it?’

She always did that. Said right out loud the things you never wanted to hear expressed, because some of them were just too terrible to contemplate.

He leaned forward, arms braced on his knees, empty wineglass dangling from his fingers. ‘I don’t want to think either of those things. What I want is for you to plug those two into your program and discover that they were really bad people involved in something that got them killed.’

‘A geriatric drug cartel or something?’

‘That would be ideal. Besides, the camp co

‘Wow. That’s pretty cold.’

Magozzi shrugged. ‘He was in the camps too. Gives him license.’

Grace was quiet for a moment, tapping shave-and-a-haircut on the wooden arm of her chair with her fingertips. She always did that when she was thinking. ‘I don’t know, Magozzi. From what I hear on the news about Morey Gilbert, he doesn’t seem like much of a candidate for criminal activity.’

‘And you haven’t heard the half of it. He spent his life helping people. Saint, hero, pick a title, I’ve heard them all. He was a good man, Grace.’

‘Too good to be true?’

Magozzi thought about that for a minute. ‘I don’t think so. I think he might have been the real thing.’

‘What about the other one, Rose Kleber?’

‘Grandma Kleber. Cookies, garden, cat, family who adored her.’

‘So another noncriminal type.’

Magozzi sighed. ‘I’m spi

Grace poured the last dribble of wine into his glass. ‘Then maybe it wasn’t something they did, Magozzi. Maybe they both happened to be in the same place at the same time, saw something or someone they shouldn’t have.’

Magozzi nodded. ‘That would be my all-time favorite scenario, but how the hell do you even start looking for something like that?’

‘That’s what you’ve got me for.’

He watched her get up from her chair, a graceful spill of black water rising into the darkness.

‘No it isn’t.’

Grace smiled and stretched, her fingertips brushing a branch of the magnolia.

The bird went nuts.

18

While Magozzi and Grace were sipping wine under the magnolia, Marty Pullman was downing scotch with more serious intent. He was sitting on the bed in a room that had once belonged to Ha

He took a deep drink from his glass and stared out the window at the dark. It was only his second night in this house, and yet it seemed a hundred years since he’d sat in his own bathtub with a gun in his mouth.

He hadn’t been fooled when Lily had asked him to stay. From any other woman whose husband of fifty-some years had just been murdered, the request would have been perfectly understandable. Grief expands to fill a newly empty house, and Marty knew better than anyone that the only thing worse than being dead was being a solitary survivor. But that’s not why Lily wanted him here. Now that Morey’s death had finally brought him out of isolation, she was going to keep an eye on him, and they both knew it. Somehow the old bag knew what he was up to. She always had – except for that one time.

He cringed when the shrill whine of the vacuum started up again. For the past four hours, Lily had been cooking and cleaning in preparation for a houseful of mourners tomorrow. He’d tried to help so she could finish and go to bed; at one point they’d almost come to blows over the vacuum cleaner. ‘Have a heart, Martin,’ she’d said to him then, and that was when he realized that the object wasn’t to finish the job at all. Marty had his bottle, Lily had her vacuum, and God help anyone who tried to take their tools of sanity away.

He grabbed the scotch, went to the kitchen for two fresh glasses, and brought them out into the living room, kicking the vacuum cleaner cord out of the socket on his way. ‘For God’s sake, Lily, sit down and rest. It’s almost eleven o’clock.’

He expected at least some resistance, or perhaps a pointed comment about the booze, but apparently, even Lily Gilbert had her limits. She sagged down onto the couch next to him and stared mindlessly at the muted TV. She was still in her child-sized overalls, but she was wearing a blue cotton babushka over her cropped silver hair, as she always did when she cleaned. The scarf baffled Marty. He wondered if she’d worn her hair long as a girl, do

‘I think the house is clean enough,’ she pronounced, to dispel any notion that she was sitting down because Marty told her to.

‘The carpet is almost bald now. Yeah, I’d say it’s clean enough.’ Marty poured her out a finger of scotch. ‘Here.’