Snow Blind

21

It was almost eight p.m. when Sampson walked into Iris’s office unannounced and plopped a Styrofoam take-out container on her desk. There was something about the way he did it that reminded her of old Puck’s glory days as a hunter, when the cat used to deposit gifts of dead rodents on her pillow in the middle of the night.

‘This isn’t a mouse, is it?’ she asked, prodding the container with her pen.

Sampson gave her a puzzled look. ‘Nope, it’s the best cheesecake in town, from Trapper’s on Highway Eight. But if you prefer mice, I saw a couple down in the filing room earlier.’

Iris had been forcing false, polite smiles all day, so it was a little startling when she felt herself genuinely smiling from the inside out for the first time since she’d crawled out of bed this morning. ‘Thank you, Lieutenant Sampson.’

‘You’re welcome, Sheriff.’

‘And thanks for… well, thanks for not making me feel like an idiot today.’

‘You weren’t an idiot today. Otherwise, I would have let you know. Why are you still here? It’s been a hell of a long day.’

‘I’m just finishing up. I authorized overtime for anybody who wants to work extra shifts until we apprehend Weinbeck. I can do that, can’t I?’

‘Hell, Sheriff Bulardo used to authorize overtime for late-night poker games, so I think you’re safe.’

‘Did he really?’

‘Sure he did. Bulardo and his cronies did a lot of things below the board, but they were good at covering their tracks. Just for the record, I never took part in any of it.’ He made himself at home on the recliner and kicked up his feet. This was definitely a bad habit Iris was going to have to address at some point very soon, cheesecake or not. ‘Hell, as long as we’re on the subject, I might as well tell you something I think you need to know.’

This didn’t sound promising. It was the kind of statement that usually prefaced bad news, like, ‘Iris, there’s something I think you need to know. Mark has been taking two-hour lunches with his secretary for the past month.’ ‘Oh? Like what?’

‘Well, I’m sure it’s not a newsflash that he’s plenty pissed about losing his seat, but he’s even more pissed that it was a woman who pushed him out. Double the humiliation for a man like that.’

Iris grimaced. ‘I figured as much. He seems like a good ol’ boy.’

Sampson nodded. ‘He is, with a network of good ol’ boys, and a lot of them are still on the force.’

Iris recalled her earlier encounter with the rude deputy at the Lake Kittering crime scene. ‘I think I’ve met one of them already.’

‘You have, and there’s more where he came from. Bulardo’s still got a lot of friends, and you’re going to have to figure out who they are and do a little house cleaning. But in the meantime, you might want to watch your back.’

Iris suddenly had the unsettling feeling that Sampson was holding out on her, telling her just what he thought she needed to hear, but not everything she needed to know. ‘What are you saying? Is Bulardo dangerous?’

‘That depends on your definition of dangerous.’

‘Dangerous is an angry, bitter, humiliated ex-sheriff who is plotting to kill off his successor.’

Sampson actually considered that for a moment, which scared the hell out of Iris. ‘I don’t think he’d ever go that far. But he can and will make your life a living hell if you give him half a chance.’

Iris sagged back in her big chair. In Bulardo’s big chair – a hand-me-down from the former regime, chosen to accommodate a six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound frame. And apparently, Bulardo’s shadow was even bigger than the man himself, and it was positioned directly over her head. ‘Great. And I thought the criminals were the only ones I had to worry about.’

‘Politicians are some of the worst criminals around. Current company excepted.’

Iris gave him a weak smile, then decided to change the subject before she did something intelligent, like tender her resignation.

‘Detective Magozzi called earlier. He said there’s a chance that Kurt Weinbeck might be connected to the Minneapolis snowmen, too.’

‘“Might” being the operative word, or we’d have half the MPD up here already stomping the county flat.’

‘They want to talk to Weinbeck badly enough to check on how we’re handling it.’

Sampson’s eyes got smaller. ‘He actually asked that?’

‘Not in so many words. He wants a call if anything breaks.’

Sampson sighed and crooked his arms behind his head. ‘If I were Weinbeck, I’d be a thousand miles away by now. And even if he isn’t, we’ve got the county covered up and locked down. I think we can sleep easy tonight.’

‘Speak for yourself. I’m going to see Steve Doyle’s face in my nightmares for the next ten years.’

‘I hear you,’ he said quietly, turning to gaze out the window, at the sprinkling of lights from the fish shacks on the lake below. ‘You know, when I first started out, I used to think that crime scenes and dead bodies and violence were all things you’d get used to eventually, because they were part of the job, and if you didn’t get used to them, you’d drive yourself crazy.’

Iris followed his gaze out the window and thought about a good man she’d never met named Steve Doyle, dying out there on Lake Kittering, a few hundred yards from where she sat. ‘Do you ever get used to it?’

‘Some do, I suppose. I never did.’ He turned away from the window and looked at the stack of papers on her desk. ‘Field reports?’

‘No. I already went through those. I was reading through the dispatch log for last night and today, just to make sure there wasn’t something we missed.’

Sampson raised his brows slightly and nodded.

In man-speak, Iris supposed that was a baby kudo for thinking of another rock that needed turning over, so she gave him a small smile. ‘The truth is, it doesn’t feel right just going home when there’s still a killer out there.’

‘There’s always a killer out there.’

That single short sentence, more than anything else Iris had seen or heard today, shook her to the core. And yet it was probably the way all cops had to think; a sad, hopeless reality that English teachers never had to consider when they put their heads on their pillows every night.

Sampson pushed himself up from the recliner with a weary sigh. ‘They’re talking about an ice storm later. Don’t stay too late.’

‘I won’t.’

He was on his feet and heading for the door when Iris suddenly realized she didn’t want him to leave. It felt good to have the company, and it would probably feel really good to wind down and let the day go with somebody who understood. And besides, she wasn’t quite ready to go home to her dark, empty house just yet.

‘Would you like to split this cheesecake with me?’ she blurted out, probably sounding desperate and pathetic, like the kid nobody would play with at school.

‘No, thanks. I already had a piece.’ He paused at the door, looked at her for a moment, then shrugged. ‘But I wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee, if there’s any made.’

Maybe he’d recognized something in her eyes, or maybe he just felt sorry for her, but Iris didn’t particularly care what his reason was for staying – she wasn’t above accepting charity at this point. ‘It’s a half-hour old. Will that do?’

‘That’ll do just fine.’ Sampson added powdered creamer and a few packets of sugar for good measure, then took his place on the recliner again. ‘So how does the city girl like living in an old farmhouse?’

‘Well, it’s creaky, drafty, the ceiling leaks, and I just got a notice from the EPA that says I have to update my septic system by next September to the tune of about fifteen thousand dollars. Other than that, it’s charming.’

‘The place sat vacant for a couple years before you bought it. A lot can happen to a house when nobody’s living in it.’

‘I’m surprised it took so long to sell. It’s a beautiful piece of property and the price was right. All it needs is a little TLC.’

Sampson tipped his head to one side. ‘Superstition still runs pretty high out here. Not a lot of people are all that eager to buy a haunted house.’

Iris rolled her eyes.

‘Hey. Don’t make fun. That place used to scare the crap out of us when we were kids.’

Iris frowned. ‘When you were kids? But the lady just died a couple years ago.’

Sampson chuckled. ‘Emily isn’t your ghost. It’s her husband, Lars, and he’s been haunting that place for almost thirty years.’

‘How’d he die?’

Sampson shrugged. ‘Nobody knows for sure. The way the old folks tell it, he was a mean, lazy, drunken son of a bitch and a whoremonger to boot.’

Iris frowned, trying to remember if a whoremonger was a pimp or a john. Who used words like that in this century?

‘Let the cows starve and the few crops he planted rot in the fields,’ Sampson continued. ‘Just kept selling off the land piece by piece to pay for his habits – and that was Emily’s land, by the way, not his. One day he just up and disappeared. Some folks figured he’d just wandered off drunk into the woods one night and died of his own stupidity; others figured Emily finally got fed up, killed the bastard, and buried him somewhere on the land. That’s when the ghost stories started.’

Iris gave him a rueful look. ‘He left her, that’s all. Sometimes men do that.’ She colored a little then, because this was a small place in a big county and of course Sampson knew her history. And now he was looking at her hard.

‘Not all men.’

‘Hmph. Speak for yourself.’

He smiled a little and got up to leave. ‘I always do, Sheriff.’

When Iris left the office a half an hour later, a wicked combination of sleet and snow had already begun to lacquer the roads, and snow-laden tree limbs were sagging perilously close to breaking point under the additional burden of ice. Judging by the fast-deteriorating conditions, Dundas County was going to be one giant hockey rink by sunrise. Sampson hadn’t been kidding about the ice storm.

By the time Iris turned onto the winding county road that would take her home, her speedometer was barely registering, and her palms were slick with sweat inside her gloves. She hadn’t seen another pair of headlights in fifteen minutes, and the absolute blackness peculiar to this alien world without streetlamps seemed to swallow her up. It was always on dark, lonely drives like this when she wondered if she’d ever get used to life in the country.

The one person in this world she counted as a friend had been horrified that she had agreed to move this far north, or as she had put it, ‘to the world center of cultural nowhere and about as far from help as you can get in an emergency. I’ve seen the country, and let me tell you, it’s dark, dangerous, and no one lives there.’

She smiled at that particular memory until it was clouded by the reminder of what a sheep she’d been then, following a soon-to-be unfaithful husband who had childish dreams a whole lot bigger than any other part of his anatomy, including his brain. And her friend had been right about most of it, especially the dark.

In the first weeks after her husband had moved out, it had spooked her whenever she pulled into her driveway at night, saw that creepy old barn jump out at her from the dark, and the shadows of countless trees and bushes that could conceal an army of intruders with imagined, evil intentions. It had taken a while for her to realize that as a rule, there weren’t any intruders out here, and the country was a whole lot safer for a single woman alone than the nicest neighborhood in the Twin Cities, for all their glorious streetlights. But despite all the sound logic that told her this was true, she still looked at simple things – an open barn door, for instance – as vaguely malevolent.

Iris finally pulled into her tree-lined driveway, past the looming hulk of the barn, with its now blessedly closed door, and up to the house. She let out a deep sigh, gathered her things, and marveled that she had made two death-defying trips in one day without a single detour into the ditch.

She was halfway to the house when she noticed the footprints. They were partially filled in with fresh snow, but undeniably footprints – two sets of them – one heading toward the house and up onto the porch, the other heading away, toward the drive.