Snow Blind

29

Gino was shaking his head, clucking his tongue, as they walked back to the car. ‘Man, was that goddamned weird or what? Walking into that house, listening to the old lady talk about shooting people, pouring tea while Kurt Weinbeck is getting stiff on the living room floor… Jesus. I felt like I just walked through the looking glass or fell down the rabbit hole or whatever the hell it was.’

‘It was pretty weird.’

‘Pretty weird? Are you kidding me? I feel like I just dropped acid or something.’

Magozzi smiled as they moved through the rapidly accumulating snow. ‘Nobody drops acid anymore, Gino.’

‘Whatever. I hope Rikker hurries it up. I just want to get the hell out of here and never come back. This place is freaking me out.’

‘So you think there’s any truth to it?’

‘What?’

‘The “bodies in the lake” business.’

‘Hell, I don’t know. The old gal showed her chops pretty good tonight. I can see her popping her husband way back when, especially after he knocked up her own sister, but I sure as hell can’t see her as a frequent flyer. Either way, it’s not our problem. We’ve got our own case to worry about, and this mess really burned us for time.’

A few of the Dundas County cars were leaving the parking lot by the time they made it back, but most of them were still in place. The deputies not working the scene clustered around idling squads, rehashing, embellishing, doing what cops did while they waited for the last of the adrenaline to burn away. An ambulance was pulling in, and one of the officers broke away from a group to direct the driver.

When they got to their own SUV, Gino flipped open his cell. ‘I’m going to call McLaren and fill him in. Maybe he has some news. At least we can make Tinker’s day, telling him a ninety-year-old lady plugged Weinbeck with the same caliber he used to kill Steve Doyle.’

There was definitely poetic justice in that, Magozzi thought sadly; it was just a damn shame Doyle wasn’t around to appreciate it. He climbed into the car, started the engine, and turned the heater on full blast. Gino opted for staying outside and pacing figure eights in the fresh snow while he talked to McLaren. Gino hated the cold, but he hated making calls sitting down even more.

‘So what’s up?’ Magozzi asked when Gino had finally finished and climbed into the passenger seat.

Gino sighed. ‘The end of a dream. Bona fide proof that we wasted a day and a half’s worth of golden hours on finding Deaton’s and Myerson’s killer. McLaren just confirmed a Friday-night alibi for Weinbeck. No way he could have done it.’

Magozzi sighed. ‘Well, that’s what we kind of figured all along. Is it tight?’

‘Totally. His sister and about forty of his hair-ball friends threw a party for him.’

Magozzi frowned. ‘So why didn’t that turn up right away?’

‘It’s classic, stupid, drowning-in-a-shallow-gene-pool stuff,’ Gino muttered, rubbing his hands together in front of a heat vent. ‘They picked Weinbeck up from prison, took him straight to a bar, and got him skunk-drunk. Stayed there until closing time, then took it back to her house and went all night. Major parole violation for Weinbeck, obviously, and she knew it, so she got real paranoid when McLaren called her up, sniffing around for info about her brother. So she did what comes naturally to people like that – she played stupid. Her loyalty lasted about as long as it took McLaren to threaten to book her as an accessory for Deaton and Myerson, then she spilled her guts. What a pisser. And usually the dumb factor works in our favor. Go figure.’

‘Shit.’ Magozzi let out a frustrated sigh and pushed on the steering wheel, suddenly feeling claustrophobic in this car, in this place, in this county. ‘So now what? Head to Stillwater, put the screws to the Snowman?’

Gino lifted a shoulder noncommittally. ‘I suppose that makes sense. Just because he didn’t hire Weinbeck to kill Deaton and Myerson doesn’t mean he didn’t hire somebody else, right?’

‘Right.’

‘It’s the strongest lead we’ve got.’

‘It’s the only lead we’ve got.’

They were both quiet for a long moment. ‘So why do neither one of us like it?’ Magozzi finally asked.

‘I don’t know. It’s more like a weird feeling than anything else. Kinda like diet pop.’

Magozzi lifted a brow at him and braced himself for another Gino metaphor. ‘Diet pop.’

‘Yeah, you know, you take a sip and it tastes just great, just like the real thing. Then a couple seconds later it gets a little thin on the palate and you can start tasting the artificial sweetener. It’s just not right, and you know it, but it’s hard to peg.’

‘Well, whether or not it sits right, we’ve got to look at it anyhow.’

‘I know.’ Gino’s leg was starting to jiggle impatiently. ‘Where the hell is Rikker, anyhow?’

A few minutes later, a black sedan pulled into an empty parking space across and kitty-corner from them, under one of the big sodium vapor lamps. Magozzi and Gino watched as a man and a woman got out, and then both their jaws dropped simultaneously.

‘Jesus, Leo, are you seeing who I’m seeing? That’s Mary Deaton’s parents.’

Magozzi nodded, finally understanding why his brain had stumbled a little when he heard Laura ask if Alice and Bill were coming. ‘Alice and Bill Warner. Which makes Alice the grand-niece that Laura and her sister raised right here.’

Gino blinked a lot of times at the overload of coincidences. ‘Goddamnit, Leo, I’m sinking down into that dark place, ’cause this stuff is really getting to me. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, we just figured out that we’ve been working on two totally unrelated cases, and yet every single goddamned thread to both of them leads us straight to Bitterroot every time. What’s that about?’

Magozzi was just shaking his head, trying to clear his mind, trying to focus. Bitterroot. Gino was right – it felt like it had to be central to both cases, because it just kept popping up, but when you looked at it close, there was nothing here to connect it to the Deaton and Myerson murders. Except the two people he was watching as they hurried through the snow, around the corporate building to the village in back. ‘I don’t know, Gino, but there can’t be anything to it. Weinbeck was up here for his wife. He saw the news about Deaton and Myerson and put Doyle in a snowman to buy himself time. And Alice Warner just happens to be related to somebody who lives here. With four hundred residents and six degrees of separation, maybe that’s not such a coincidence.’

Gino pressed both hands to his forehead. ‘You know those smoothies when they put a bunch of different fruit in a blender and turn it on high? That’s what my brain feels like right now. A big pink-and-gray smoothie. And I got that diet soda feeling again.’

Magozzi’s eyes followed Alice and Bill Warner until they moved out of sight. He totally missed Iris walking up to the car.

‘Thank God,’ Gino said, jumping out of the car and opening the back door for her, eager to keep things moving and get the hell out of here. ‘It’s cold, Sheriff. Hop on in.’

She nodded her thanks and climbed in the back on a gust of cold wind and a faint hint of orange.

Soap? Shampoo? Cough drop? Magozzi wondered, searching for a mystery he might solve before they started piling dirt on him.

‘Thank you for waiting, Detectives. I know you’re probably anxious to get back to your own case. Is there still a chance that Weinbeck is your killer?’

‘Not a chance,’ Magozzi said. ‘We just alibied him.’

‘Then we’ve wasted your time here. I’m terribly sorry for that, but terribly grateful, too, for what you did tonight.’

Now that he was close to heading for home, Gino was feeling magnanimous. ‘You did pretty damn good yourself,’ he told her. ‘Not bad for your first day, Iris Rikker.’

She flashed him a grim smile. ‘Yesterday I would have been hiding in a closet, speed-reading the manual, trying not to get sick. You’d be surprised what you can learn in a day, watching good officers do their job.’

It was a great thing to say, and Magozzi started really liking her for the first time.

‘Listen, I won’t keep you long, but I really need some advice, and I would very much appreciate your professional opinions.’

Aside from food and sex, not necessarily in that order, the best way to worm your way into Gino’s heart – or any man’s heart, come to think of it – was to compliment him professionally. Magozzi wondered if Iris’s phrasing had been intentional or if it was just knee-jerk. Sometimes he thought all women were born with a special strand of DNA that made manipulating men effortless and instinctive.

Gino gave her a paternal smile. ‘Anything we can do, Sheriff. Ask away.’

Iris took a deep breath. ‘Well… how much stock would you put in some of the things Laura was saying?’

Magozzi and Gino looked at one another. ‘There could be some truth to it.’

‘Would you drag the lake, come spring?’

‘That’s totally your call, Sheriff.’

‘Thank God,’ Gino added tactlessly. ‘I wouldn’t want to touch that for a million bucks.’

Iris looked a little disappointed, but the wheels in her head were still turning. ‘Under normal circumstances, I probably wouldn’t give a second thought to what Laura had to say, given the clear evidence of her diminished capacity, but the bones really bother me.’

‘What bones?’ Magozzi asked.

Iris looked surprised. ‘Sampson didn’t tell you?’

‘Haven’t talked to him since he called me out of bed this morning, and all he said then was that you were tracking Weinbeck from your place to Bitterroot, and if we wanted in on it, to get up here. I got the feeling things were pretty tense on your end when he called.’

Iris nodded. ‘We were moving pretty fast then. But it turns out Weinbeck wasn’t the only thing in my barn. We found what was left of a body in a locked room under the barn floor – little more than a skeleton, really. Sampson thinks it was Emily’s husband. He disappeared decades ago.’

Magozzi’s brows shot up. ‘Murdered?’

Iris shook her head a little and Magozzi smelled orange again. Definitely shampoo. ‘We didn’t have a spare second to look at the time. Weinbeck was running then. The BCA’s coming out later this morning to take a look.’

Gino had a funny look on his face. ‘A locked room, you say?’

‘It was worse than that. More like an underground prison cell, no windows, a single trapdoor in the ceiling, no way to reach it.’

‘Oh, man, I’ve got goose bumps. Jeez, that’s creepy.’

Iris nodded. ‘It’s the connection that’s giving me the willies. I’m living in a house where a woman very possibly imprisoned her husband, perhaps killed him, and it turns out she just happened to be the niece of another woman I just interviewed because she also killed a man tonight, and claims to have killed others, and I have to ask myself, what the hell are these women teaching their daughters?’

Magozzi turned completely around in his seat to look at her, and noticed for the first time. Gino was right. She was a looker. ‘What are you thinking? Some kind of twisted family legacy?’

Iris rubbed at her face. It felt like years since she’d washed it. ‘I don’t know. I just know that it has me wondering about what really might be at the bottom of Lake Kittering.’

Magozzi and Gino were both silent for a moment, taking it all in, then Gino shrugged. ‘So what’s the down side of dragging?’

‘It’s a big lake, Gino,’ Magozzi reminded him.

‘An enormous lake,’ Iris amended. ‘It stretches from the county offices on one end, over to the back of Bitterroot property, all the way to the land behind mine. The cost would be astronomical. The worst part is that whether or not we found anything, the dragging operation itself would make people believe the worst, no matter what the results. If we found something, bad ending. And if we didn’t, a lot of them would say we just hadn’t looked in the right place. They’d never stop believing there were bodies in that lake, and politics still rule up here. I think they’d find a way to shut Bitterroot down.’

Gino blew out an exhale that almost moved his brush cut. ‘Really tough call. What are you going to do?’

‘I was hoping if I asked nicely, you’d tell me.’

Magozzi smiled a little, and then went serious. There were too damn many moral questions to this job. Most of the time you knew which side of the line you were supposed to walk, but sometimes, the road on one side of it looked just as crooked as the road on the other.

‘Shit,’ Gino grumbled when she left the car. Apparently she and Sampson were headed over to her place to wait for the BCA. ‘I sure as hell hope nobody ever asks us for advice again.’

‘Me too,’ Magozzi said as he shifted into drive and heard the snow crunch under the tires.

He was really depressed now. Iris had half bent getting out of the car, and he’d gotten a good whiff of her hair. Fresh air, no orange; so it wasn’t shampoo. Another unsolved.