The Sixth Idea (14 page)

I
n the hour since Harley had commandeered their phones, Magozzi and Gino had been working Monkeewrench's secure landlines, following up with local law enforcement on the other murder victims in other states. Grace was still trying to trace the source of the cyberattacks on the Chatham server and Spencer's website, and Harley had been largely silent at his desk, all his attention focused on their cell phones.

“Bingo,” he finally barked. “You guys are clean now, but you had ears on you, and pretty impressive ones at that. We're not talking some drive-by bluejacker looking for your personal information. Whoever it was went through your carrier, and believe me, that is hard to do, unless you're the NSA.”

“Jesus,” Gino murmured.

“Hey, it could be a good thing. It's one more path for Grace and me to follow. But here's the deal—no telling how long you stay clean.
This isn't amateur hour.” He smiled and turned over their phones. “Of course, I took the liberty of uploading a new firewall that will make anybody who tries to hack you deeply sorry they did, but that's beside the point. You could have infected the whole MPD communication network, or maybe that's where you got your bugs in the first place. Either way, call Chief Malcherson, tell him you've been compromised and that the department needs to do a deep security sweep and clean up the system.”

Gino stared down at his phone like it was a mortal enemy. “Sure thing. Should I tell the chief we're considering the possibility that the government is behind it, and by the way, we also think they're assassinating innocent people who pay their salaries?”

Harley shrugged. “Our government, somebody else's government, Chinese hackers, terrorists—at this point it doesn't really matter. Safety first.” He reached under his desk and pulled out a lockbox. “Answer your calls on your regular cells, talk to Angela and ask her what she's making for dinner, but use these temporarily for more sensitive conversations.” He tossed them two cell phones. “Burners. Untraceable, unhackable.”

Magozzi looked out the window at the worsening snow that was now blowing sideways. Forty-eight hours ago they were investigating a simple shooting in a downtown Minneapolis alley; now they were using burner phones and spinning government conspiracy theories.

“Guys?” Grace called from the other side of the room. “We got something from the Beast.”

Harley rolled his chair over to a printer that was spitting out pages. He read and reread them, then passed them over to Magozzi and Gino and went to his computer.

“What is it?”

“A BOLO on an Arthur Friedman, an advanced Alzheimer's patient who supposedly wandered out of his care facility, but I have my doubts about that.” He started typing furiously on his keyboard.

Magozzi frowned down at the photo of Arthur Friedman and the list of pertinent details. “What do you mean? And why would the Beast spit out a ‘Be on the Lookout' for some Alzheimer's patient?”

“Because we linked the Beast to Spencer's website so it could access all the data there and make any connections. See here?” He tapped his screen. “Arthur Friedman is one of the original eight physicists, the only other one alive besides Alvin Keller. If Alvin Keller is still alive.”

“Shit,” Gino muttered. “Somebody took them both—two sick old men, goddamnit. I'm going to make some calls and turn the fire up on this.”

Magozzi started when his cell rang from its cradle in his sweaty palm. “Unknown caller.”

Harley rubbed his hands together and returned his attention to his computer screen, making a few quick strokes on his keyboard. “Goody. Answer it, I'm monitoring you right now. If it's legit, call them back on our landline.”

“Magozzi here.”

The voice was timid, quaky, frightened. “Detective Magozzi. This is Lydia Ascher. I met with you and Detective Rolseth yesterday at the Chatham.”

“Of course. Ms. Ascher, can I call you back at the number you're calling from?”

There was a slight hesitation. “Can you call back right away?
Because there are two dead men in my house, and one of them is the man in the sketch I drew for you yesterday. The sketch of the man I thought was following Chuck Spencer in the airport.”

Magozzi was instantly focused, alert, totally wired. “Are you alone?”

“No, the police are here—”

And then there was another voice talking to him, a Deputy Harmon, giving him a concise cop summary of what had happened.

“I'm on my way,” Magozzi answered in a rush of breath. “Jesus Christ, don't leave her alone, Deputy. I'll explain when I get there.”

M
agozzi and Gino had left Harley's minutes after Lydia's call, but there was no rushing the drive, which had been hampered by snow-covered roads that deteriorated the farther north they got.

Magozzi was white-knuckling the steering wheel of the sedan; Gino was white-knuckling his travel mug of coffee as he stared out the passenger window, unconsciously redistributing his weight around in his seat to compensate for every shimmy or slip of the car.

“This sucks,” Gino finally complained. “How many times have we caught a case in winter and ended up driving north through shit weather to follow a lead?”

“At least it's not an ice storm.”

“Where are the snowplows? I haven't seen one snowplow since we left Harley's. And by the way, what the hell are we walking into? The man from the airport wasn't at Lydia Ascher's for tea and cookies, I can guarantee you that. Jesus, Leo, we caught him on tape,
standing outside Spencer's hotel room with a gun right before Spencer bought it in the alley. And he had a partner. I'm a little worried about Lydia's life expectancy right now.”

“I hear you.” Magozzi made a turn onto a curvy, tree-crowded lane. Under normal circumstances it would have been charming, but now it seemed like an oppressive physical representation of where they were at right now with their cases—lost in the middle of a claustrophobic, twisting labyrinth that maybe didn't have an exit sign at the end.

“Why do people live out here?” Gino mumbled, straining against his seat belt as he looked through the windshield.

“Because they can. It's pretty. Isolated. Quiet.”

“Yeah, and mostly safe, until you find two dead guys in your house. People still get killed outside the city limits.”

“This is something different.”

“You're telling me.”

Magozzi pulled into a snowy driveway. Through the trees he could see the confetti of flashing squad car lights. They were confronted by two deputies with guns drawn—one at the driver's side, one at the passenger's side—before they could open the car doors, which made them both feel a little better about Lydia Ascher's safety. Magozzi and Gino held their badge cases up to the windows and their car doors were opened simultaneously.

“Glad to see you, Detectives. Would you please step up to the sidelight windows on either side of the front door, and then stop?”

Another layer of protection, Magozzi thought, knowing they had Lydia somewhere close, where she could look out unseen and confirm their identities before they gained entrance. After a moment
Lydia Ascher opened the front door. A deputy stood beside her. Magozzi had always thought that he and Gino presented a benign and comforting presence to most they encountered, but this woman was frightened. It made him feel guilty for no reason.

“Thank you for coming, Detectives,” she said. “This is Deputy Harmon, you spoke with him on the phone.”

The niceties were brief, and once Lydia was sitting on the living room sofa with another deputy, Harmon led them down wooden steps to the basement level. As they made the descent, their heads swiveled, taking in everything around them, finally focusing on the dead man next to the pool table near the foot of the staircase.

“Otis Ferringer, Lydia Ascher's neighbor and close friend,” Harmon explained. “She took it hard, figures he walked into something when he came over for dinner and it's her fault.”

Gino's eyes were busy. “He comes to dinner toting a shotgun?”

He gestured at the Winchester still clutched in the dead man's hand.

It was the first time Deputy Harmon broke cop character, looking off to the side and swallowing. “Otis carried that Winchester everywhere, never shot at anything except skeet or to put a wounded animal out of its misery. Lived here his whole life, kind of a legend to the locals, you know? And he took care of Lydia from the day she moved here.”

“And the other DB?”

Harmon led the way to the laundry room where the man depicted in Lydia Ascher's sketch was lying on his side in a small pool of blood. It was beyond creepy, seeing the drawing of a man not brought to life but to death, right before their eyes.

“Don't know who he is. No ID, no personal effects except for this nine-millimeter Ruger lying on the floor by his hand. It wasn't discharged and neither was Otis's shotgun. It looks like a small caliber brought them both down, but we haven't found a third weapon or any shells or casings. I did a year in the Cities before I came back home, saw a bit of this kind of thing. But never here. I took this post to get away from that shit.” He stopped abruptly, startled by his own language. As a rule, cops didn't use vulgarities beyond their own circles. “Excuse the language, Detectives. I'm way out of my league here.”

“No problem,” Magozzi reassured him. “Seems like we're poorer for losing you, Deputy Harmon.”

“Nice of you to say so.”

“So we have a missing shooter.”

“Yes sir, which means we've still got some deadeye out there and frankly, it's got us all on edge. Spooked, actually. We do domestics, DWIs, and roadkills. Nothing like this.”

“BCA is on the way?” Magozzi asked.

“En route, along with the local doc who covers suspicious deaths until the big boys get out here. Doesn't happen often.”

“Deputy, we have good reason to believe that this incident is connected to several other homicides. Technically, this is your ball game, your jurisdiction. Understand, we have nothing solid that would stand up in court to justify our gut instincts here, but we think Lydia Ascher was the intended target, and may still be a target.”

Harmon blinked at him. “Jesus. So she's not safe?”

Gino's brows crowded together as he shook his head. “We believe she needs to be put in protective custody as soon as possible. Does Jefferson County have that capability?”

Harmon had been struggling with nerves since they'd arrived, but for the first time he exuded a little bit of confidence. “Sheriff Gannet is ex-military. He ran a protective detail unit in Iraq for three years. First thing he did when he got sworn in was implement an emergency response protocol for every single thing that could possibly happen, from protecting a witness to a dirty bomb detonation. A lot of the force and the county commissioners thought it was a little over the top, but I guess the sheriff's smarter than all of us put together. I'll let him know right away.”

Magozzi let out a breath. “She's in good hands, then.”

“You bet. There's a little motel across the lake that caters to the summer fishing crowd, then closes for the winter. We've done training drills there. It's easy to cover from all angles, and we'll pull in Highway Patrol to help out. Listen, I should check in with my men and call Sheriff Gannet. Holler if you need anything.”

“Thank you, Deputy.”

Magozzi followed Gino toward the staircase, then stopped at the entrance to another room that had a huge bank of windows looking out onto a woods and a snow-covered lake beyond. He looked past a birdfeeder down to a long dock with a weathered, snowcapped wooden bench at the end.

He saw himself on that bench with a fishing pole in one hand and a beer in the other, and wondered what the hell he'd been doing with his life. This wasn't a Lake of the Isles mansion or one of those Lake Minnetonka mega-million show-offs. It was just a plain house, and all he thought of was that he could afford this, he could live like this, and what the hell had he been doing in the shabby remains of his ex-wife's choice of habitat in the middle of the city?

Grace had been absolutely right to call him out on that, just as he'd been absolutely right to call her out on the very same matter. They were both stuck in tiny, suffocating houses with ugly, suffocating histories—little time warps of negativity that had long outlived their usefulness.

And this was a revelation he'd never seen coming—maybe he and Grace really did have some common ground, something he'd never even dared to hope for.

He looked around the room and saw an easel, tablets, and a table covered with art supplies.

“Don't tell me there's another dead body in there.”

Magozzi looked over his shoulder with a funny smile. “Check this out, Gino.” He stepped aside and gestured to the sketch pad on the easel. Gino saw his own face staring back at him, precisely, perfectly rendered in charcoal.

“Well. Isn't that something. Think she has a crush on me?”

Magozzi nodded. “The only possible explanation.” He walked back to the laundry room and Gino followed. “You do realize we have a pattern emerging here.”

Gino rocked back and forth on his heels. “Of course I do. Chinchilla lady at the Keller house. She was there to kill Alvin Keller, one of the original H-bomb scientists.”

“We don't know that for sure.”

“Pretend we do. So, somebody stops chinchilla lady with a .22 before she can kill Alvin. Then, at our very own feet, at this very minute, we have airport guy. He was here to kill Lydia—pretend we know that. Somebody stopped
him
with a .22. Coincidence? Hell no. What we've got here are two sets of killers—one set is trying to kill
the descendants, and the other set is trying to save them, and don't even ask me who the players are because it's as obvious as a black cat on a snowbank and you know it. Chinchilla lady sealed that up and slapped a bow on it. Americans, Russians. Mini Cold War.”

Magozzi looked down at the airport guy. After listening to Gino's tangled reasoning, looking at a dead body was almost restful. “So you're saying the Russians are trying to kill all the descendants. And probably the last two surviving original scientists.”

“Of course. The Russians are always the bad guys.”

“And they're killing them why?”

“Well, I haven't quite thought that through, but let's face facts—the original scientists, the architects of the Sixth Idea, whatever it is, all worked for the U.S. government and lived here unmolested for the last sixty years. So did their families. Then, suddenly, the Sixth Idea appears on the Web courtesy of Charles Spencer, and somebody starts bumping off the kids and grandkids of these guys and stealing their computers and papers. Are the Americans killing their own citizens? Of course not. So that leaves the Russians—they want the Sixth Idea, and they'll do anything to get it.”

Magozzi tried to grimace away a growing headache. He wanted to curl up in a ball in the corner, but when Gino was on a fishing expedition for mermaids, you had to throw in a courtesy line. “How is killing everybody with any possible knowledge of the Sixth Idea going to help the Russians get it?”

Gino cocked a brow. “Excellent question. So let's change things up and say the Russians and the Americans have the Sixth Idea. That means we're looking at a third party. The ayatollah of Crazy-stan heard about the Sixth Idea and he's pulling out all the stops to
get in on the action. Who wants Crazy-stan to have the Sixth Idea? Nobody. Safer to kill everybody who might know something than to let things get into the wrong hands.”

“So the Russians and the Americans are killing everybody?”

“No way. Remember, the Russians are the bad guys. And there's some brave American operative out there with a .22, operating in the shadows, saving the day, saving Alvin Keller and Arthur Friedman and Lydia Ascher from getting kidnapped and brought back to Crazy-stan for torture. Or killed by the Russians to shut them up.”

“Gino.”

“What?”

“You're kind of going off the reservation.”

He lifted his shoulders. “Just thinking out loud.”