Snow Blind

26

Iris Rikker had called Magozzi back on the way to Bitterroot, giving him a quick update on the break in the fence and frozen cameras. By that time he and Gino were already in the car, heading north.

‘Can you believe the balls of that bastard?’ Gino shook his head after she hung up. ‘He has to know every cop in the county is looking for him, and what does he do? Hangs around and breaks into the one place they’re looking for him hardest.’

‘Not balls,’ Magozzi grunted. ‘Blind, stupid rage.’

‘Whatever. Christ. I can’t believe it’s five-thirty in the morning and we’re on our way to Cow Patch again.’ Gino was in the passenger seat, slurping coffee from a jumbo travel mug while Magozzi concentrated hard on the road. The freeway was plowed and sanded and they were making good time to Dundas, but the puffy bags under his eyes were partially obstructing his vision.

‘Let’s just hope Kurt Weinbeck is the end of the road and we can tie this thing off and be back in bed by noon.’

‘Jeez, are you listening to motivational tapes or something? It never goes down that easy and you know it. None of us ever really liked Weinbeck for killing Deaton and Myerson. The way I look at it, we got called out of bed to freeze our asses off stomping through some snowy nowhere just so we can talk to the guy long enough to cross him off the suspect list for sure. Meanwhile, Iris Rikker catches a murderer on her first day in office, and you and I get hammered for making a bunch of road trips on somebody else’s case while our own Minneapolis cop killer runs around loose. We are not getting a happy ending out of this.’

‘You want to turn around and go home?’

‘Nah. The puke killed Doyle for sure. Maybe we’ll get lucky and corner Weinbeck in the woods by our lonesome, slap him around a little just for fun. That’d make me feel better. You hear anything new on the Pittsburgh snowman this morning?’

Magozzi kicked the speed up a few notches while Gino wasn’t looking. ‘I called again before I left the house, talked to their night guy. They’re still thinking copycat.’

Gino nodded. ‘That’s what I figure. Our case just gave every sociopath in the contiguous forty-eight plus Alaska a cool, new way to pose bodies. Mark my words, snowmen will start cropping up all over the place, then somebody’ll write a book, and then they’ll make a TV movie of the week. Minneapolis – Ground Zero for Every Lunatic in the Country. The Chief will just love that. The poor guy still hasn’t gotten over “Murderapolis,” and that was over a decade ago.’ Gino sighed and squinted ahead into the beams of the headlights. ‘Oh, shit. Is that snow?’

The southernmost edge of the storm front seemed to end right at the Dundas County line. Once they made the turn off the freeway, the county roads deteriorated fast, and there were an alarming number of cars in the ditch for a place that was so sparsely populated.

‘Jesus,’ Gino muttered under his breath. ‘It looks like a used-car lot out here.’

Magozzi pointed to sagging, ice-coated power lines that looked like silver filament when they caught the light. ‘Looks like they got an ice storm.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I see that, just keep your eyes on the road. Man, that little track into Bitterroot is going to be a bitch.’

Maggie didn’t often leave her little house at night, and certainly not alone. As the longtime manager of Bitterroot, she knew better than anyone that the complex was as safe as technology, caution, and human ingenuity could make it. There probably wasn’t a safer place in the entire world for a woman to walk alone after dark. The reasoning part of her brain knew that. The other part – the one that stored the memory she’d been trying to forget for fifteen years – that was what kept her inside after the sun went down.

The chase had lasted a long time, starting in the house, leaving a wreckage of furniture behind as Maggie had dodged from one hiding place to another, finally making it out the door and into the front yard, screaming, bleeding, crying. She knew the neighbors would hear; she also knew it would be too late, because Roy was right behind her, still swinging the crowbar, and by then he didn’t even look like her husband anymore, just a horror-movie package of blind, red-faced rage because Maggie had done the unthinkable by trying to fight back for the very first time in her life. There had been no moon, just stars stitching a lacy pattern in a dark, dark sky. Even in her terror she had noticed that, just before the crowbar came down one last time on the back of her skull.

There was still a definite depression where bone had finally knitted itself together – a ledge, really, that made her look like a Neanderthal with his face on backwards – but she covered that by fluffing her hair. Only a few people knew it was there. Laura was one of them, and Laura’s house was where Maggie belonged in times of trouble. A victim of abuse herself, she’d founded Bitterroot with her sister Ruth sixty years ago, and had devoted every year since to creating a haven where women could live without fear. As far as Maggie was concerned, the old woman had saved the lives of every single resident in Bitterroot – her own included – and that gave her the strength to face her night demons and hurry through the ice and snow to Laura’s old farmhouse as soon as Iris had called.

Not that she believed Kurt Weinbeck or any other uninvited man would actually make it into the complex. The cameras would be on him the moment he touched the fence, the monitors would notify perimeter patrol, and a team of very well-trained and well-armed women would be on-site before he made it to the other side. No one ever made it past the perimeter patrol. Not anymore.

The farmhouse wasn’t far from the main residential section, but it was far enough, and isolated enough to make the trip a harrowing one for a woman afraid to go out after dark. Maggie had been inordinately proud of herself for making the journey, thinking that after all this time, perhaps she was finally getting a little better.

She’d found Laura sitting in her favorite chair by the fireplace, bundled in a worn terry robe several sizes too large for her fragile frame. It was faded from years of washing, and frayed past mending around the cuffs, but the robe had belonged to her sister, Ruth, gone these many years, and she refused to give it up. Maggie hadn’t been surprised to find the old woman out of bed at such an hour. More and more lately, Laura had been getting day and night confused.

‘We have to lock the doors tonight, Laura,’ Maggie had told her, and at that moment Laura’s eyes had narrowed and sharpened, and, in them, Maggie saw the stalwart, intelligent woman she had been before her good brain had started to deteriorate.

‘What happened?’

‘Julie Albright’s ex-husband is on his way here. The sheriff thinks he’ll try to get to her.’

A little of her old fire had flashed in Laura’s eyes. ‘Let him try. He’ll never get past the perimeter.’

But less than half an hour later Maggie got the call from Security, telling her that the ice had frozen the cameras and motion detectors and that the fence had been cut. She knew the news would devastate Laura, send her quickly back down that gray hole of mindlessness that overcame her when she was tired or stressed, but Laura surprised her.

‘Where’s Julie?’ she demanded, as alert and acute as Maggie had seen her in some time.

‘In her house, under guard. By our people and several deputies. We had to open the gates for them, Laura. They’re coming in force, to search the whole property. They’ll be going door to door, checking on everyone.’

Laura closed her eyes, and seemed to shrink in on herself as Maggie watched. ‘My poor girls,’ she whispered. ‘Strange men in the compound, banging on doors… they’ll be so frightened.’

‘The call system is notifying everyone. They’ll know they’re policemen, here to help. Some of them will be women.’

Laura was shaking her head strongly, because she knew that wouldn’t make a difference. The walls had been breached, the strangers were inside, and the sense of safety would evaporate with the first man who walked their streets unescorted. ‘Sixty years, Maggie. A lifetime to build this place, to make it safe, and it’s gone in a second…’

‘No, Laura, that’s not true,’ Maggie insisted. ‘You made a utopia here. You saved our lives, every one of us.’

‘So we build Utopia, and all it takes is one crazed man to bring it down? That’s not right, is it?’ Laura looked up at her, and Maggie saw the eyes clouding, wandering, following the erratic path of thoughts that had already started to scatter and lose focus. ‘Did you drink my tea? I can’t find my tea. Someone took my tea. Do you have it in your pocket?’

Maggie looked away quickly and brushed at her eyes. It always broke her heart a little to watch Laura’s quick shifts from apparent lucidity to muddled confusion. It was like watching a normal mind suddenly blink out like an old lightbulb. ‘I must have taken it into the kitchen by mistake. I’ll make more, Laura. And I’ll bring you a cookie.’

‘Really? That would be so nice.’

Maggie went to the kitchen and set the tea kettle on to boil. She was slicing a lemon when she heard the soft thud from the back porch that stopped her heart.

Stop it, Maggie. It’s just a clump of snow falling off the roof. Nothing more than that. You did so well tonight. Don’t lose it now just because of a little noise. Move, damnit. Don’t just stand here like a frozen rabbit. Slice the lemon. Prepare the tray. Get the cookies, because there’s nothing out there… except maybe a deputy. Remember? Now, don’t you feel silly? It’s probably just a deputy coming up the back steps. And all you have to do is turn around and look and you’ll see that, and everything will be all right.

But Maggie couldn’t turn around. Her mind was already fifteen years back in time, right after she’d stumbled for the last time in the darkened yard. She’d known then that if she didn’t move fast, Roy would catch her and kill her with the crowbar. And yet then, as now, terror paralyzed her. A single tear rolled down her cheek.

Stupid then, and stupid now, Maggie told herself just as the glass pane in the back door shattered behind her.

By the time they pulled up to the corporate building, the snow was really coming down, every light in the complex was blazing, and Dundas County cars were all over the lot.

Iris Rikker was standing in the middle of a cluster of newly arrived deputies, and although she didn’t look like much of a sheriff in her puffy parka and little moonboots, she seemed to be acting like one.

When Gino and Magozzi walked up, they heard her speaking tight, short and fast, not one extra word, just like a real cop, directing the officers in pairs wherever they were needed. Gino kept silent, brows raised, probably wondering how she’d learned to do that in the space of a day.

‘Where do you want us?’ he asked her, treating her like any other cop in command. Magozzi wondered if she knew what a compliment that was.

‘The fence was cut around the back of the property. I’ve got men tracking from that end, but they lost the trail about an acre in. Snowshoe tracks fill in fast, so now they’re just coursing. I put a contingent around Julie Albright’s place, the rest of us are doing house-to-house checks as fast as we can, but it’s a lot of houses.’

‘Point us in the right direction,’ Magozzi said.

‘I was on my way back anyway.’

She led them around the huge corporate building instead of through it. There was no road, but a path had already been beaten through the snow by the deputies who had come before them. Iris was moving fast.

‘He’s on snowshoes,’ she said as they hurried. ‘Easy to track, but we don’t know what kind of a head start he had. The ice froze the cameras so they can’t move and put the motion detectors out of business, so the communication center is blind. He could be anywhere.’

‘How tight is the cover on Julie Albright?’

‘Four outside, two in. We have Julie and her daughter in an interior room.’

Just saying Julie Albright’s name aloud hit Iris hard, and stopped the straight line of her thoughts, if not her feet. What the hell was she doing, and when had she become so arrogant? She’d run against a sitting sheriff who at least knew how to do the job, damnit, and her reasons hadn’t been one bit noble. And now it had all boiled down to this: a ruined woman and a beautiful child huddled in a house not too far from here, and whether or not they lived through this night depended on a pretend sheriff doing everything absolutely right.

She turned her head to look at Magozzi and Gino. ‘What else?’ she asked in a voice that sounded like a plea. ‘What else needs to be done? What did I forget? Sampson had to run to check on his sister…’

She looked scared to death, totally unlike the assured woman he’d seen directing deputies like a pro, and now Magozzi got it. Sampson had been her crutch all day, her teacher, probably, but he hadn’t been around for the big one. She’d done this on her own, and now she wasn’t sure it was enough. It would take years on the job before she realized you always felt like you hadn’t done enough.

‘It sounds good,’ he said, because that was the bare-bones truth, and Magozzi wasn’t big on head-patting.

‘Just like downtown,’ Gino added. ‘As long as you’ve got one of the outside guys at Julie’s pulled back for an overview, cause sometimes guys working a building get so focused they forget to look around…’

She didn’t even wait for him to finish; just started talking into a shoulder unit she had tucked under her jacket. ‘Thank you,’ she said to Gino when she’d finished. ‘I didn’t know to do that.’

Gino shrugged. ‘You will next time.’

In the daylight, the village had looked idyllic; at night, it looked like a beautiful Christmas card gone wrong. A lot of the little houses still sported holiday lights, their colors softened and muted by the snow, and every tree branch glistened with a brand-new coating of ice. But there were armed men and women patrolling the narrow street now, approaching the cheery front doors like malevolent trick-or-treaters, and occasionally a fearful, cautious face peered from a lighted window.

‘You need to get those people away from the windows,’ Magozzi said, and Iris nodded.

‘We just started on this block. I had them cover the ones that backed up to open land first, the ones that were in a direct line from where the fence was cut.’

‘Let’s cover it, then.’

The three of them split up, moving fast, and after ten minutes and four houses, Magozzi thought that if he never saw that haunted look in a woman’s eyes again, it would be too soon. God. Every single face behind every single door looked the same.

He and Gino finished their last houses on the block at the same time, and met up in the middle of the narrow street. They saw Sheriff Rikker standing under a streetlight just ahead, making marks on a damp, wrinkled piece of paper, snow accumulating on her head and shoulders.

‘She stands still much longer in this, we’re gonna have to dig her out,’ Gino observed as they approached.

It was quiet on the block now, with all the houses searched. A few officers remained behind, assigned to patrol, but the snow deadened the sound of their movements. They could hear the shushing noise of their own boots pushing through the white stuff, even the scratch of Iris’s pen on the paper; but that was all.

‘This block next,’ Iris stabbed at a map of the village layout, then started leading the way.

They barely had a chance to move before they heard the shot. It was off to their left, down a continuation of the narrow street that cut into open land.

The sound had been muffled, Magozzi thought as all three of them started running; but you could tell it had started out big; maybe as big as the sound of the gun Kurt Weinbeck had used to blow a hole in Steve Doyle’s chest.