home a long time ago.’
‘Yeah, well, I seem to remember telling you the same thing.’ She gave him a glance. ‘You look worse than I do.’
‘Always did.’
She smiled a little, stood, pulled on her jacket, reached in to settle her shoulder holster properly, then zipped up. ‘Feels good, doesn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘Getting the first date out of the way.’ She pulled a dark watch cap over her head, flattening a fringe of brown against her forehead. ‘Next time we can sleep together.’
Well, that certainly woke him up.
10
The dead jogger by the river had been the lead story on all the stations in Minneapolis, which was almost a miracle, Detective Leo Magozzi thought, being that it was the middle of football season.
On orders from the chief, he and his partner, Gino Rolseth, had worked the case all day, shunting last week’s murder of a Hmong teenage girl over to Gangs. Gino hadn’t liked that. ‘You know how much this sucks, Leo?’ he’d complained bitterly on their way out of the chief’s office. ‘We get pulled off one murder and slapped on another, and don’t tell me it isn’t politics when the one we’re pulled off of is a Hmong gang member and the one we get put on just happens to be a nice white boy in his first year at the seminary.’
The nice white boy had a set of very nice white parents that he and Gino destroyed in the few seconds it took to say, ‘We are so sorry to tell you that your son is dead.’
After they’d asked the questions they had to ask, they waited until friends of the parents arrived to take their place in the new and terrible solitude, and then they walked away from the dead-eyed, emotional ruins that had been parents before their arrival. Funny. The mother of the Hmong girl had looked just the same.
Gino hadn’t been much good after that. He always took the kids hard, and Leo sent him home early so he could look at his own kids and touch them and talk to them while all the time he’d be thinking, Thank God, thank God.
Magozzi didn’t have any kids to talk to, or any god to thank, for that matter, so he stayed at the station until eight o’clock, making calls, sifting through interviews and the preliminary forensics report, trying to find a lead that would hint at either a motive or a suspect on the dead jogger. So far, he’d come up empty. Jonathan Blanchard was almost a caricature of a model citizen: a 4.0 seminary student who was putting himself through school working twenty hours a week – Christ, he volunteered at a homeless shelter on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Unless he was running drugs or laundering mob money out of the soup kitchen’s back door, they were looking at a dead end.
Frustrated and melancholy, Magozzi had finally given up for the night and gone home to his modest stucco on the edge of uptown Minneapolis. He ate a microwave dinner, sorted his mail, then escaped up a rickety second-floor ladder into his attic studio to paint.
Before the divorce, he’d painted in the garage, slapping mosquitoes in the summer and standing in a circle of space heaters in the winter that doubled their electric bill. The day Heather moved out, taking her aversion to turpentine and chemical sensitivity to anything she didn’t buy at the Lancôme counter with her, he’d dragged all the paraphernalia inside and set up in the living room. For two months he painted there, just because he could, and only hauled everything up to the attic when his Froot Loops started to taste like mineral spirits.
He took a deep, calming breath as he popped up through the hatch, savoring the warm tang of turpentine and oil paints that saturated the air. Now this was real aromatherapy.
It was almost two o’clock in the morning by the time he washed his brushes and crawled into bed, exhausted. The fall landscape was still just blocks of color, a mess really; but it would shape up nicely, he thought as he drifted off to sleep.
The bedside phone shrilled him awake at a little
‘Yeah, well, I seem to remember telling you the same thing.’ She gave him a glance. ‘You look worse than I do.’
‘Always did.’
She smiled a little, stood, pulled on her jacket, reached in to settle her shoulder holster properly, then zipped up. ‘Feels good, doesn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘Getting the first date out of the way.’ She pulled a dark watch cap over her head, flattening a fringe of brown against her forehead. ‘Next time we can sleep together.’
Well, that certainly woke him up.
10
The dead jogger by the river had been the lead story on all the stations in Minneapolis, which was almost a miracle, Detective Leo Magozzi thought, being that it was the middle of football season.
On orders from the chief, he and his partner, Gino Rolseth, had worked the case all day, shunting last week’s murder of a Hmong teenage girl over to Gangs. Gino hadn’t liked that. ‘You know how much this sucks, Leo?’ he’d complained bitterly on their way out of the chief’s office. ‘We get pulled off one murder and slapped on another, and don’t tell me it isn’t politics when the one we’re pulled off of is a Hmong gang member and the one we get put on just happens to be a nice white boy in his first year at the seminary.’
The nice white boy had a set of very nice white parents that he and Gino destroyed in the few seconds it took to say, ‘We are so sorry to tell you that your son is dead.’
After they’d asked the questions they had to ask, they waited until friends of the parents arrived to take their place in the new and terrible solitude, and then they walked away from the dead-eyed, emotional ruins that had been parents before their arrival. Funny. The mother of the Hmong girl had looked just the same.
Gino hadn’t been much good after that. He always took the kids hard, and Leo sent him home early so he could look at his own kids and touch them and talk to them while all the time he’d be thinking, Thank God, thank God.
Magozzi didn’t have any kids to talk to, or any god to thank, for that matter, so he stayed at the station until eight o’clock, making calls, sifting through interviews and the preliminary forensics report, trying to find a lead that would hint at either a motive or a suspect on the dead jogger. So far, he’d come up empty. Jonathan Blanchard was almost a caricature of a model citizen: a 4.0 seminary student who was putting himself through school working twenty hours a week – Christ, he volunteered at a homeless shelter on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Unless he was running drugs or laundering mob money out of the soup kitchen’s back door, they were looking at a dead end.
Frustrated and melancholy, Magozzi had finally given up for the night and gone home to his modest stucco on the edge of uptown Minneapolis. He ate a microwave dinner, sorted his mail, then escaped up a rickety second-floor ladder into his attic studio to paint.
Before the divorce, he’d painted in the garage, slapping mosquitoes in the summer and standing in a circle of space heaters in the winter that doubled their electric bill. The day Heather moved out, taking her aversion to turpentine and chemical sensitivity to anything she didn’t buy at the Lancôme counter with her, he’d dragged all the paraphernalia inside and set up in the living room. For two months he painted there, just because he could, and only hauled everything up to the attic when his Froot Loops started to taste like mineral spirits.
He took a deep, calming breath as he popped up through the hatch, savoring the warm tang of turpentine and oil paints that saturated the air. Now this was real aromatherapy.
It was almost two o’clock in the morning by the time he washed his brushes and crawled into bed, exhausted. The fall landscape was still just blocks of color, a mess really; but it would shape up nicely, he thought as he drifted off to sleep.
The bedside phone shrilled him awake at a little
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