Snow Blind

10

Even with four-wheel drive, it took Iris well over half an hour to travel the fifteen miles of county highway to the Kittering Road turnoff. Lieutenant Sampson – whoever the hell he was – had been right about the roads. They were slick with the new glaze of ice, and now fat white pinwheels were spinning out of the dark to splat on her windshield. Four more inches before it was all over, the radio DJ announced with that perverted glee of a born Minnesotan.

The old-timers who lived in Dundas County liked to think of it as Minnesota’s frontier. Sixty miles to the south, the twin cities of Minneapolis-St Paul beckoned to the high school seniors like a two-dollar whore; but one step over the northern county line and you were as likely to run into coyote and bear as you were a commuter.

They were coming, of course. The empty land on either side of the freeway was starting to fill up, and eventually those Armani-suited hobby farmers would venture this far north, but for now the houses on the road Iris drove were pitifully few and far between.

Her fingers tightened on the wheel as she imagined the long, cold walk for help if any of the locals on the roads this morning lost traction and ended up nose-deep in a snowy ditch. Up here there were still a lot of people – especially the old-timers – who regarded cell phones with deep suspicion.

As she made the left turn onto a twisting, narrow road she felt the tires of the Explorer spin, then catch, then spin again, and wondered if she’d die en route to her first day on the new job. Lake Kittering waited on her left, fifty feet straight down from the road that clung to the side of the hill. In a couple months there would be patches of black water scattered across the white ice like dozens of open mouths, hungry for the next car that would challenge the much-dented guardrail and lose.

Local lore had it that the road up Kittering Hill to the County Courthouse had dispatched more defendants than any judge in the district, and on this particular morning, Iris Rikker believed it.

By the time she topped the treacherous slope, Iris had eaten all the lipstick off her lower lip, and she couldn’t feel her hands anymore. She loosened her grip on the wheel and flexed her fingers to bring back the circulation.

She skidded past the two-story brick building that housed the Sheriff’s Office and jail, its windows throwing yellow light out into the snowy dark. Her eyes briefly darted left and she shivered, thinking of walking into that building later, facing the people who had awakened this morning subordinate to the first female sheriff in county history. She should have brought doughnuts or cookies or something. It was probably the only way they’d let her in the front door.

A block beyond the courthouse, the road started a sharp downslope toward the lake. She figured she was at the public boat landing when the road ended and the ice shacks began. Shorty’s Garage was a gray metal pole building a block beyond the courthouse, right on the lakeshore. The lot was cluttered with unlicensed vehicles in various states of demise, including an ice-encrusted green junker that was tethered to a tow truck like a homely dog on a leash. An equally ice-encrusted Dundas County deputy was standing at the rear of the car.

Iris left the Explorer blocking the entrance and slogged through the snow toward him.

‘You Rikker?’ he asked from behind a hood that nearly obscured his face.

Iris stifled the impulse to answer ‘Me Rikker,’ wondering why no one in this county ever spoke in complete sentences. ‘Yes. Are you Lieutenant Sampson?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ Iris said, sticking out a mittened hand, which Lieutenant Sampson either didn’t see, or chose to ignore. The people of the county gave her seven more votes than the incumbent sheriff, but it was pretty obvious that the deputies weren’t happy about it.

Sampson smacked the trunk of the junker, making her jump. ‘Lottery car.’

Iris squinted through the snow at the old wreck. ‘You’re kidding. That car is a lottery prize?’

He snorted or sighed or made some kind of a sound Iris couldn’t interpret. Or maybe it had just been the wind. ‘Forgot. You’re not from around here.’

She considered telling him she’d lived in the county for a whole year, that her latest pair of Keds hadn’t even seen a city sidewalk, then decided against it. You were always an outsider in a place like this, unless you’d been born in a farmhouse your great-grandfather built with his two hands and a pair of mules, or some such nonsense.

‘We put a junker out on Lake Kittering every winter,’ he explained. ‘The whole county bets on the day and hour the car will finally fall through the ice. Been doing it since I was a kid. Winner gets bragging rights, proceeds go to charity. This time some asshole put the car over a spring, and that warm spell for the past couple weeks cracked the ice yesterday and she went down, just before the first storm hit.’

Iris suppressed a shudder and tried to look sheriff-like. ‘So the body is in the car?’

‘Nope. Just making conversation. Body’s out there.’ He jerked his head toward the lake. ‘Just beyond that cluster of shacks. Come on.’

He was ten feet away and almost lost in the increasingly heavy snowfall by the time Iris got her legs to move and hurried after him down to the shoreline and out onto ice that was surely waiting for the city girl’s single misstep before cracking and sucking her down into the frigid depths. She decided that that was why he’d told her about the car, the bastard. So she’d know the ice could crack at any moment beneath her weight.

Bastard, bastard, bastard, she repeated mentally as she slogged after him through the frozen drifts that looked like choppy waves, sweating inside her layers of clothing, telling herself she could do this. If she survived the walk, examining a dead body was going to be a piece of cake. After all, she’d seen bodies before. She’d been to funerals. And of course she’d imagined seeing her ex-husband dead a million times, preferably next to the nineteen-year-old slut he’d run away with less than a month after he’d moved her into a broken-down old farmhouse so far from the city that the people seemed to speak a different language – one without complete sentences.

She almost ran into Sampson’s back when he stopped suddenly. Iris squinted through the driving snow and saw two deputies in winter gear just standing there. One of them glared at her, saying nothing. The other, all baby fat and blue eyes, gave her a nod. ‘Morning, Sheriff. Deputy Neville.’

‘Good morning to you, Deputy Neville,’ Iris said, then caught her breath when the deputies moved aside, showing her what was behind them.

In one way, it wasn’t as bad as she had feared – no blood, no gore, no immediate sense that what she was looking at was a dead human being – but in another way it was worse, because Iris may not have had a decent hot-water heater or an adequate furnace, but she did have a television, and she’d watched it long into the night.

‘Oh, Lord,’ she murmured, looking at the fat, ice-encrusted snowman leaning against one of the ice fishing shacks. Snowman head, snowman body – not as storybook perfect as the ones she’d seen on the news last night, but close enough – totally encased in hard-packed snow, except for the hands. Those were exposed, whitish blue, and unmistakably human, wrapped around a fishing pole.

‘I take it you saw the news last night,’ Sampson said.

Iris could only nod.

‘From the look of it, I’d say we’ve got snowman number three out here.’

Iris found enough to breath to ask, ‘Have you called the coroner?’

‘Right after you.’

‘Then where is he?’

‘Mexico.’

‘Mexico?’

Sampson shrugged. ‘It’s January in Minnesota. Everybody’s in Mexico. MPD and the BCA are going to want to cover this one anyway. My guess is they’ll beat feet to get up here five minutes after our call.’

‘From Minneapolis?’ Iris blew frosty air out into the coming dawn. ‘It’s going to take them hours to make the trip on these roads.’

‘Yep.’

‘When did you place the call?’

‘Didn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Don’t have the authority.’

Iris blew an exasperated sigh into the frosty air of the coming dawn, wishing she’d spent a few of those quiet nights on dispatch reading the department handbook, if they even had such a thing. ‘Well, then, who does?’

‘Just the sheriff.’

Iris closed her eyes, then fumbled in her parka pocket for her cell phone. ‘So whom do I call, and what’s their number?’

Sampson kicked at the snow with heavy lace-up boots that looked a lot warmer than hers. ‘Well, if it was me, I’d call Minneapolis PD and ask for Detective Magozzi or Detective Rolseth. They caught the snowman scene down at the park yesterday. But you’re going to need a landline for that, especially in this weather. I had to go inside just to call you.’

‘Fine. In the meantime, are you the department’s homicide investigator?’

‘Nope.’

‘Well, whoever he is, get him out here to take charge of the scene.’

‘Homicide investigator’s here already.’

Iris’s eyes fixed on the other two deputies stretching crime scene tape in a rectangle around the snowman. ‘Which one is he?’

This time Sampson rolled his head all the way left to look at her, and she could see his face for the first time. He was smiling, just a little. ‘That would be you, Sheriff Rikker.’