The Sixth Idea (21 page)

M
agozzi was staring at the smoke-stained log walls of Grundy's Bar, a great blue-collar hole-in-the-wall in St. Paul. Gino wasn't happy with Dahl's choice of a meeting place because it was the single bar in the greater metro area that didn't serve food, but Dahl was the one taking all the risks, so the choice was his.

The bar had been in its current location since opening as a speakeasy in the early thirties, and the place still had a secretive, dangerous feel. There were a few patrons at the rail, engrossed in a hockey game playing on the big TV behind the bar. Nobody was talking—it was the kind of place people came to to wind down after a shift or nurse their private sorrows in silence. The bartender looked like a mobster, and maybe he was.

Nobody seemed to notice that three men in suits were sitting at a corner table, even though the place probably hadn't seen a suit since Al Capone used to visit.

Special Agent Dahl was silently swirling a glass of Coke on a wet coaster, wearing a perfect poker face; Magozzi and Gino had opted for something stronger. They had laid down almost all their cards, including a recap of Malcherson's meeting with Shafer. Eventually Dahl raised his eyes, apparently having lost interest in his soda. No wonder—conversations like the one they were having required alcohol.

Dahl still looked like he belonged on the set of a surfing movie, but he'd lost his tan since the last time they'd seen him. “I have no idea why you think I can help you with your homicides, Detectives,” he finally said.

Gino finished his beer and put his empty glass down on the table—it resonated a few decibels above what was socially appropriate in polite company. “We just spent the past half hour telling you why. We're dangling on the end of a limb here. And by the way, we appreciate your time, so how about we don't waste it.”

Dahl's mouth ticked up a little. “Excellent effort at diplomacy, Rolseth. Okay. Essentially, you just told me a group of innocent people are getting murdered because their predecessors worked on the hydrogen bomb almost sixty years ago, and they dreamed up some kind of secret program nobody seems to know about. And you suspect our government is behind it, killing its own civilians. Do you know how outrageous that sounds?”

“Touché, and an excellent effort on your part. Great technique, putting words in our mouths. But we never said anything about our government, or anybody else's government, which means you inferred that from what we just told you.” Gino let out a puff of air. “We have a little experience interrogating people, too. Give us some credit.”

“After last fall, I'm not likely to ever underestimate you two.”

Gino rolled his head back and sighed. “What we're telling you is a bunch of innocent people are getting killed after they signed on to Charles Spencer's website and started talking about the Sixth Idea, whatever the hell that is. Somebody with a .22 is killing the killers. And somebody sent a sniper—a frigging
sniper
—after Lydia Ascher when the first guy couldn't get the job done. And not a single one of our crime scenes has choked up any evidence we can use. No ballistics matches, no IDs. We're dealing with shadows, which makes it pretty damn hard to do our job.”

Magozzi ran his thumbnail around a heart-shaped groove that had been scratched into the old wooden tabletop. The tables had also been around since Prohibition, and bore the marks and scars of generations. There were a lot of tiny pieces of lives and their stories on this table that nobody would ever know. “The only thing we have are chinchilla lady's prints.”

Dahl said, “That's the woman you think was sent to kill Alvin Keller?”

“Right. NCIC popped a prints match, but there's a big black access constraint stamp on it.” He raised his eyes to meet Dahl's. “What's that about?”

Dahl's eyes flickered, then stilled.

Gino had seen that no-compromise look on his partner's face a few times, the most recent when he was racing to save Grace MacBride's life. He knew better than to interrupt whatever eye duel he was fighting with Dahl.

“What the hell does that mean?” Magozzi gave him exactly two seconds to answer before leaning across the table. “Not a good time
to play coy, Dahl. The FBI runs NCIC and you're high enough on the ladder to know this shit, goddamnit. The body count is climbing.”

“I'm going outside for a smoke,” Dahl said, standing up, laying his cell on the table, holding out his hands to Magozzi and Gino, clearly asking for theirs without saying a word.

“It's frigging freezing out there,” Gino complained, even as he surrendered his cell and pulled on his coat.

Dahl cocked his head. “When was the last time you had a cigarette?”

“Nineteen ninety-seven.”

“Tempted?”

“Oh, yeah. It's only been a couple decades. Damn habit lasts forever.”

Five minutes later, the three of them were shivering on the cold seat of a bus stop bench. Dahl didn't make a move to light up.

“You don't smoke, do you?” Magozzi asked.

“No. Never have. But it's a great excuse to leave a building. Just because Monkeewrench cleaned your phones doesn't mean anything.”

“Well, shit,” Gino mumbled. “So, give it to us, Dahl.”

“The Bureau got a red flag when you ran . . . chinchilla lady's prints.” He winced a little. “Do you nickname all of your victims?”

“Only when there are too many to keep track of.”

He nodded, as if that made perfect sense. “Anyhow, that's standard with access constraints. Whenever any law enforcement runs prints on somebody with a federal cover on them, we hear about it. And when your request for an ID came in, I went to Shafer to see if I could clear it for you.”

“And?”

“He said forget that I ever saw it, and never mention it again. I've never heard those words out of his mouth before. Whoever put the access constraint on her file wanted to know if this lady ended up dead or detained. But they don't want anyone else to know anything about her.”

“Which means what?” Magozzi watched Dahl's eyes dart around nervously. There was plenty of paranoia to go around.

“She was one of ours.”

“You
know
that?”

Dahl nodded once, just barely.

Magozzi let that settle for a moment. Dahl had just given them a hell of a lot more than he should have, and he wondered why. Now Magozzi was going to repay the favor, and give him a hell of a lot more than he should. “Our sources tell us she was KGB and that Interpol registered a death certificate for her three years ago.”

“That's our work,” Dahl said. “She was turned.”

“Jesus,” Gino whispered. “You're in on this?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Is Shafer?”

“I honestly don't know. I doubt it. He has orders, just like everybody else up and down the food chain. Access constraint can mean a lot of things. I only know what I know because I have a couple contacts who help me out from time to time.”

“So she's FBI?”

“Highly unlikely—we're just the federal arm of domestic law enforcement. This kind of work is outside the Bureau.”

“Do you know who she was working for?”

Dahl shook his head. “She could be undercover for a lot of agencies. I don't even know the names of half of them. We get directives mandating access constraint without being told why, or who ordered it. Or she could be undercover for a black budget outfit, in which case you are never going to get to the bottom of this.”

The three of them sat huddled on the bench, silent, staring at the snow gathering on the sidewalk at their feet. Magozzi finally spoke. “Why are you telling us this, Dahl? This isn't just your job on the line, it's your ass. This little chat of ours could send you to federal prison.”

Dahl turned and looked them both in the eye. “I work for the Department of Justice. I took an oath to uphold justice. And you just made a very compelling case that an agent of the U.S. government was sent to assassinate Alvin Keller, an elderly citizen who honorably gave years of his life in the service of that government. That's not justice, that's an abomination.”

“I couldn't agree with you more. So, can you help us solve our homicides?”

“I don't know yet. I haven't seen Shafer since he met with your chief, so I have to take his temperature on this before I can give you any kind of answer.” Dahl fastened the top button of his coat, then got up from the bench. “I'll talk to him. Give me your burner numbers and I'll call you when I know something. Where can I find you if I need to meet you in person?”

Magozzi scrawled phone numbers on a card and passed it over. “We'll be with Monkeewrench. At Harley's.”

After retrieving their phones from the bar, the three men headed for their respective vehicles. “Huh,” Gino muttered. “So this is
already on the Fed radar and we didn't even know it. Gee. Funny we never got a courtesy call.”

“Must have been an oversight.” Magozzi got behind the wheel of their sedan and cranked the engine. Frigid air blew out of the vents. “Dahl's spooked.”

“He's not the only one. So what's your take on him? You think he knows more than he's telling?”

Magozzi thought about that, then shook his head. “It didn't play that way. Shafer's got blinders on him and I think he wants to know what we know, just like we want to know what he knows.”

Gino snorted and scraped frost off his side window with a thumbnail. “Too bad none of us know shit.”

M
agozzi was parked in front of Gino's house, listening to a horrific, pseudo-jazz version of “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” while he waited for him to change the shoes and socks that had been soaked during the trek through snowy Curtis Park to view Alvin Keller's body.

Gino had been inside for a while, which meant he was either raiding the refrigerator for leftovers, having a quickie with Angela after forty-eight hours on the job, or both. Whatever, Magozzi was happy for him, and happy to be sitting alone in a crappy sedan with a crappy sound system playing crappy music, just breathing for a while with no distractions.

His eyes wandered the neighborhood, looking for lights and decorations like he had as a kid. There were nods to Christmas at almost every house on the block—some kitschy, others more subdued. There was a nice pine wreath on Gino and Angela's front door,
frosted white from the recent snow. It was studded with real pinecones and fake holly and topped with a fat red velvet bow. Magozzi knew this because he had the exact same wreath on his front door, courtesy of Gino's youngest—the Accident—who had recently joined Cub Scouts and was successfully learning the ways of fund-raising. They were starting them early these days.

“What did Angela give you to eat?” Magozzi interrogated Gino when he finally got back to the car, smelling like garlic.

“She fed me a piece of her mind for ruining my shoes, that's what. Damn. She almost raised her voice.”

“Come on. Cough it up. I can smell it, and Angela never forgets me.”

“She thinks you'd starve to death if she didn't feed you.”

“She might be right.”

Gino withdrew a foil-wrapped package from his parka pocket, just as Magozzi had hoped he would. “Meatball sub with provolone, still warm. Extra peppers and napkins for you.”

Magozzi ascended to cheesy meatball nirvana and for a few brief moments all was right and good in the world. After his third bite, he jockeyed into sparse traffic on the boulevard that bisected Gino's neighborhood. Snow was still falling steadily, gathering in growing clumps on the lilac bowers in the center median. Years ago, the median had been lined with grand old elms, but the few trees that had survived the second major Dutch elm disease outbreak in the nineties had been uprooted by straight-line winds eight years ago. It had been a civic tragedy, and although the lilacs were pretty in the spring, they had an impermanent quality, like most things in the twenty-first century.

When Magozzi's phone rang on the sedan's console, he fumbled
for it with messy fingers and it slipped out of his grasp. “Shit. Gino, can you grab that?”

Gino reached for it and answered. “Hi, Grace. Leo has his mouth full of meatball and can't talk right now.” He listened for a few moments. “Dahl? Yeah, he's on the up-and-up, don't shoot him.” He paused and listened again. “Okay, we'll see you soon.” He hung up and wiped a smear of tomato sauce off the screen with his glove. “Dahl's meeting us at Harley's for a face-to-face.”

“That was fast. Something must have happened in Fedland.”

“Yep. Grace said they might have caught a break with Lydia's book, too.”

Agent Dahl was already there when they arrived at Harley's, waiting for them at the door. Grace, Harley, and Lydia were notably absent.

“So you're the butler now, Dahl?” Gino asked, his nose upturning at the distant aroma of something baked and sweet. “How did you pull this off? I mean, Harley and Grace know you, but what gives? It took them two years to let us in without handcuffs and blindfolds.”

“Charm,” Dahl deadpanned. “Pure charm.”

“Sure.” Gino looked around. “Where is everybody?”

“In the kitchen. I was told not to leave the foyer until you two arrived. I got past the front door, but that's where the welcome wagon ended.” He looked up at the big spruce Christmas tree. “Do you know there's a fifty-caliber handgun hanging from the inner boughs?”

“Harley gets really creative this time of year,” Magozzi said, moving closer to Dahl. “So what happened with Shafer? Is this an official visit?”

Dahl shrugged. “No. I'm off the clock until further notice.”

“So, off the books.”

“Yes. Which I'm certain is the only reason your friends let me in.”

Magozzi raised a brow. “But Shafer sent you here.”

Dahl didn't answer right away. He didn't have to. Shafer wanted him here without his hands tied. If Monkeewrench came up with some important, ill-gotten information, Dahl could present it as an anonymous tip and Shafer would have plausible deniability if the shit hit the fan. In that case, Dahl would probably be the fall guy; a rogue agent teetering on the same gray line that Magozzi and Gino often confronted when it came to Monkeewrench. “I'm here to offer whatever support I can,” he finally said.

Magozzi really didn't care what the backstory was—Dahl was an extra gun and an extra pair of eyes, and it was a reasonable assumption that they all had the same end game in mind—find the bad guys and keep Lydia Ascher alive. He gestured toward the kitchen, and Dahl and Gino followed.

Grace was on the phone, pacing the floor, and Harley and Lydia were sitting motionless at the breakfast bar, listening to the one-sided conversation intently. They all gave distracted waves to Magozzi, Gino, and Dahl, but nobody said anything that would interrupt.

Since the phone call was clearly important and nobody was talking, Gino grabbed a Christmas cookie from a plate on the counter to give his mouth something to do while he waited.

The room seemed airless until Grace finally hung up and acknowledged the newcomers with sharp blue eyes. “Annie and Roadrunner are on their way to the cemetery,” she pronounced with no explanation.

“What cemetery?” Magozzi, Gino, and Dahl asked in unison.