‘Good question.’
Gertrude Larsen was obviously long past retirement age, and she looked pathetic, wrapped up in a sagging, faded cardigan and shivering in the backseat of the squad in spite of the sun warming the car’s interior. When Langer approached the open door she looked up with bleary, narcotics-glazed eyes. A few tears traveled the wrinkled valleys down her cheeks, but there was no emotion attached to them.
Langer had seen the look many times, on tranquilized survivors of murder victims, on kids flying on their parents’ Valium, but the shivering concerned him. He knelt down next to the car and touched the elderly woman’s arm. ‘How are you feeling, Ms Larsen?’
She smiled weakly and raised a quaking, arthritis-curled hand to cover his. He couldn’t imagine this work-worn woman still scrubbing and sweeping and keeping a house. ‘A little better.’
‘Did you take something?’
She nodded, a little embarrassed, and handed him a small plastic prescription bottle. ‘One of those pink ones.’
Langer opened the bottle and raised his brows when he looked inside. There were pink pills, blue pills, yellow pills, and a dusty cluster of Tums. The pink ones looked like Xanax, but he couldn’t be sure.
‘I take one of those if I get really upset,’ she explained.
‘I understand.’ Langer made a note of the clinic address on the bottle and handed it back to her. She tucked it in a little-old-lady purse with a metal clasp at the top. ‘Are you feeling well enough to answer a few questions for me?’
She nodded slowly, dabbing at her eyes with a damp handkerchief with a lace border.
Langer was exceedingly gentle with the old woman, and it was a slow-motion interview, but eventually they learned that she’d been Arlen Fischer’s housekeeper for thirty-two years, came three times during the week by bus and every Sunday morning, also by bus, to help him get ready for the nine o’clock service at
‘Was the tapestry runner very valuable?’
Her watery eyes crinkled. ‘Well, you don’t often find one with birds on it; certainly not bluebirds; and yes, it was a bit pricey. Eighty dollars plus tax.’ She leaned a little closer to him and confided in a whisper, ‘But I got it on clearance. Nineteen ninety-nine.’
Langer smiled back at her. ‘Quite a bargain.’
‘Indeed it was.’
Langer thanked her, gave her his card, then asked Frankie to drive her to the
Frankie sighed miserably. ‘You know what the ER at HCMC looks like on a Sunday?’
Langer shrugged apologetically. ‘She lives alone, Frankie, she’s self-medicating, and she’s still shivering in that hot box of a car. I’m a little worried about shock.’
‘Okay, okay, but you should have been a missionary or something.’
He and McLaren stood in the driveway and watched the squad pull away.
‘So now what are you thinking?’ McLaren asked. ‘That the shooter moved the books to steal a twenty-dollar tapestry runner?’
‘Don’t forget, it had bluebirds on it. You don’t often find those.’
‘Jeez, Langer, was that you trying to be funny?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Well stop it. You’re scaring me.’
An hour later, Jimmy and his crew were still at it, but things were wrapping up. Langer and McLaren found him prone on the living room floor with a tape measure and a notebook, scribbling down figures.
‘Hey, Jimmy,’ McLaren said with as much cheer as he could muster after spending Sunday morning in a murder house. ‘You got this thing solved yet?’
Grimm gave him a tired smile and got to his feet with some effort. ‘At this point, I’m not even sure we have a homicide. Next time, try to get a body, guys. It’ll make things a lot easier. You hear back from the hospitals?’
McLaren thumbed through his notebook. ‘Yeah. Only gunshot wounds reported last night were from a couple of sixteen-year-old gangbangers trying to pop each other with .22’s. The best they could do was soft tissue stuff, no artery hits . . .’
‘It wasn’t a .22.’ Jimmy held up a little bag with a slug inside. ‘.45 caliber, and some nice rifling, by the way.’
‘.45, huh? Well, in that case, whoever got shot here last night didn’t make it to any hospital or clinic we know about.’
‘Then he’s dead,’ Grimm said matter-of-factly, looking at the sofa.
Langer followed his gaze, feeling a little queasy. ‘That’s a lot of blood.’
Jimmy shrugged. ‘Looks worse than it is. I’ll have to run saturation tests to be sure, but at first blush I’d say your victim left this house alive. There’s not nearly enough blood for a heart shot. I’m guessing an extremity. But arteries don’t heal themselves. He’d bleed out in a hurry without medical attention of some sort, and there’s not a drop of blood anywhere else in the house.’
McLaren grunted. ‘So somebody shot him, bagged him, and carried him out, which means we’re looking for a sumo wrestler. According to the housekeeper, Arlen Fischer weighed over three hundred pounds.’
Jimmy Grimm was rocking back and forth on his heels, grinning at them. ‘Nobody carried him out.’
‘Yeah? What then? Aliens sucked him up from the couch?’
‘Better than that.’ Jimmy smiled, enjoying his secret.
‘Jesus Christ, Langer, throw him down, I’m going to take the pliers to his nuts,’ McLaren grumbled.
‘God, the Irish are so impatient,’ Jimmy sighed, pointing to a section of wooden floor marked off with tape. ‘We found wheel marks. From the couch, through the kitchen, out the door and into the garage. Four wheels, not two. Your shooter brought a gurney.’
‘Whoa.’ McLaren’s red eyebrows shot up. ‘Premeditation with a capital
P.
’
‘I’d say so.’ Jimmy’s plump arms reached for the ceiling in a stretch. ‘Well, we’re about to clear this place and head back to the lab. Apparently they’re bringing in a ton of trace from that scene down at the tracks . . .’ He stopped in mid-sentence, his hands falling to his sides. ‘Oh, for God’s sake. Did you say Fischer went three bills?’
Langer nodded. ‘At least.’
Jimmy closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘Man, that blew right past me. My tech said the guy on the tracks was a beefer.’
‘Do they have an ID on him?’
Jimmy shrugged, and Langer pulled out his mobile. ‘Tinker and Peterson caught that, right?’ he asked McLaren.
‘Right.’
Langer punched some buttons, put the phone to his ear, listened for a few seconds, then said, ‘Tinker, this is Aaron. Tell me about your man on the tracks.’
No one had ever accused Tinker Lewis of being reticent. You asked him how he was, you got the story of his life with no hope of a reprieve. Langer tried to interrupt a couple of times, finally gave up and listened in resigned silence, his face infuriatingly expressionless.
McLaren fidgeted and paced for as long as he could stand it, then finally cozied up to Langer and tried to get his ear near the phone.
‘Okay, Tinker, thanks,’ Langer said. ‘I have to go now. McLaren is making a move on me.’ He signed off, tucked the phone away, then simply stood there, rocking back and forth on his heels with a grim smile.
McLaren flapped his arms in frustration. ‘Goddamnit, Langer, you want me to beg?’
‘There was no ID on the body at the tracks. The man was elderly, easily three hundred pounds, with a big hole in his left arm, just above the elbow.’ He gave Jimmy Grimm a nod. ‘Artery hit, just like you said, Jimmy.’
‘So he bled out?’
Langer’s lips tightened, erasing the remainder of his smile. ‘No, he didn’t. They think he had a heart attack, probably when he saw the train coming.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ McLaren muttered, seeing too vividly the picture of an old, injured man tied to the tracks, looking up and seeing the single headlight of a moving train, heading toward him.
‘But if he’d lived,’ Langer continued, ‘the ME says he would probably have lost the arm. Somebody put a tourniquet on it, way too tight, and it was on there way too long.’ He raised his brows at McLaren. ‘It was a tapestry thing, Tinker said, with little blue birds all over it.’
McLaren blinked at him, then blew out a silent whistle. ‘So their guy is our guy.’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Jesus.’ McLaren looked over at the couch and shivered a little, absorbing the totality of what had happened here. ‘This is really sick, Langer.’
‘No argument there.’
‘What we’ve got is some sadistic son of a bitch coming in here, shooting the poor old guy in the arm, strapping him to a gurney and rolling him out, then driving him over to tie him to the train tracks . . .’
‘. . . making sure to keep him alive the whole time so he would know what was coming,’ Jimmy Grimm finished. ‘God in heaven.’
Magozzi watched them load Morey Gilbert’s body into the ME wagon, wincing when the bag bounced hard as the gurney wheels folded. He’d seen a lot of bodies go into that wagon over the years, but he never got used to that final bounce as they all left home for the last time.
It was a relief when the wagon’s doors slammed shut and the children masquerading as Medical Examiner assistants climbed in and drove away.
‘Who are those kids?’
‘Just a sec,’ Gino said into his cell phone, then held it against his chest. ‘Those are not kids. Those are grownups with medical degrees. They’re starting to look like kids ’cause you’re starting to get so damn old.’
‘I’m in the prime of my life. Forty’s so far away I can’t even see it from here. How come we got assistants anyway? Where the hell’s Anant?’
Gino sighed. ‘Doing the old guy tied to the train tracks, that’s where. And the kids did just fine. I watched them. They wore gloves and everything. Can I finish my call now?’
‘Are you having phone sex with Angela?’
‘No. With Langer. And you interrupted at a critical point. Do you mind?’ He put the cell phone to his ear again. ‘Sorry about that, Langer. Leo’s having a midlife moment.’
Magozzi kept silent for exactly five seconds. ‘The train track guy was old, too?’
‘Jesus. Hang on, Langer . . . Yeah, Leo, he was old. Way old.’
‘That’s three in one night, Gino. Morey Gilbert, whoever bought it in the bloody house, and the train track guy.’
‘Actually, it looks like it’s only two, and if you’d give me a second to finish this call, I’ll find out everything you ever wanted to know about old dead people. Jeez. You’re like a little kid, tugging at my pants leg.’
‘You don’t have a pants leg.’
Gino gave him a nasty look and stomped away across the parking lot, cell phone pressed to his ear.
Magozzi found a bench in the shade at the front of the greenhouse and sat down next to a stack of bulging plastic bags that smelled like chocolate. Sunday-morning traffic was picking up on the parkway, but he could barely hear it through the dense evergreen hedge that blocked all but the driveway from the street. It made for a nice, quiet piece of real estate in the middle of a city; nice for shopping, living, or shooting an old man in the dead of night without fear of being seen.
A couple of crime-scene techs were still inside, processing the area around the table where Lily Gilbert had laid out her husband. Two more were around the side of the building, trying to find a scene on the rain-washed asphalt where she said she’d found him, but as far as Magozzi was concerned, they were all just going through the motions. Intentionally or not, Lily Gilbert had washed away any evidence the rain missed.
He hated this case already, because he knew where it was going. Nobody just popped geriatrics for the fun of it. Unless robbery was involved, the suspect list was always short, and almost always family. He’d take a drug-crazed psycho any day over relatives murdering each other. There wasn’t a monster in a closet any bigger than that.
Gino was heading back toward him across the lot, his broad face already pinking from the sun, his holstered 9-mm bouncing a little against the plaid Bermuda shorts. He slumped down on the bench and wiped the gathering sweat from his forehead. ‘Can you believe it was snowing last week? Man, it’s hotter than hell out here. Gotta be eighty already and it’s not even noon. Wish the son would get here so we could blow this pop stand.’
‘What’s Langer got?’
Gino leaned forward and rubbed his hands together. ‘Now that one’s really interesting. He and McLaren have this bloody house and no body, and Tinker and Peterson out at the train tracks have this body and not enough blood. Thanks to the miracle of cell phones they communicate, and
voilá.
Turns out the old guy that owns the bloody house is probably the guy tied to the tracks. They’re going to get an ID from the housekeeper, but it looks good.’
Magozzi straightened a little on the bench, frowning. ‘Well that’s a puzzler.’
‘No shit. From what they can put together so far, somebody shot this old man in his house, hit an artery in his arm, then get this. They put a tourniquet on him so he wouldn’t bleed to death before they could get him to the train tracks. Spooky, huh? They wanted him alive to see the train coming. Anant’s got him on the table now, but he’s thinking heart attack.’
‘Jesus.’ Magozzi thought about that for a long time, didn’t like anything his brain came up with. ‘They scared him to death.’
‘Looks that way. Anyhow, he was shot with a .45, our guy here was hit with a small caliber, and the m.o. sure as hell doesn’t tie any knots.’
‘So no connection between ours and theirs.’
‘Just that they were both old men, living in the same neighborhood.’
Magozzi rubbed his eyes, felt the sweat collecting on his lids. ‘I don’t even like that much.’
‘Yeah. Me either. But nothing else fits, so on the face of it, we’re looking for two killers.’ Gino eyed the plastic bags next to the bench. ‘Are these the ones the old lady moved all by herself?’