Snow Blind

31

A long, long time ago, before there were bodies in snowmen and living rooms and maybe even in lakes, Iris had made chicken soup and tucked it in the freezer. She nuked it for five minutes while she was cutting fresh vegetables and getting out the noodles, then put it on the stove and let it rip.

She could hear Sampson’s heavy tread as he paced around the downstairs like a man trying to walk off a problem. He’d volunteered to make all the calls they had to make, and that had suited Iris just fine. She was starving.

He came back into the kitchen carrying Puck, who seemed delighted with the situation.

‘You like cats?’

‘Not really.’ Sampson slumped at the kitchen table and settled the purring mass of black fur in his lap. ‘She kept winding between my legs every time I took a step, damn near put me on my ass a dozen times. Seemed safer to pick her up and haul her along.’

Iris smiled as she ladled out two bowls. ‘We’re having soup for breakfast.’

‘Thanks. It smells great.’ He spooned with one hand and stroked Puck with the other. ‘The hospital agreed to put Weinbeck’s remains in the cooler for the day. Neville posted a man there, so we’re okay. BCA says they won’t make it out here till noon, at the earliest. They’ll process your barn first, then pick up Weinbeck on their way back into town.’

‘What about the scene?’

‘They’re still collecting and printing. Neville’s staying there until they’re finished.’

‘So we have time.’

‘More than we’ve had in a while.’

They were both into their second bowl when Gino called Iris to ask for directions.

‘They’re coming back?’ Sampson asked her.

‘Apparently. He didn’t say why, just that they’d be here in a few minutes, and could we wait for them.’

‘Huh. Wonder what that’s about.’ He leaned back in his chair and looked down at the cat in his lap, wondering why it felt so good to pat the dumb old useless thing. He’d never liked cats; never liked chicken soup much, either, but for some reason one of them felt pretty damn good on the inside of his stomach right now, and the other one didn’t feel all that bad curled up on the outside. It was the stuff going on inside his head that was eating at him. ‘You should shit-can me, you know.’

‘Excuse me?’

Sampson pressed his lips together and looked around the kitchen. ‘I like this room.’

‘Thank you. I do, too. Why should I “shit-can” you?’

‘I bailed on you back there. Just took off, and left you to handle everything.’

Iris sighed and pushed her bowl away. ‘You went to protect your sister, Sampson. I would have done exactly the same thing in your position.’

Sampson looked straight at her. ‘Don’t do that. Don’t ever make excuses for a cop walking out on his partner. Ever. One of them does it, you fire their ass. That’s your job, now.’

Iris put their empty bowls in the sink and leaned back against the counter, arms folded across her chest. ‘A lot of us were working alone out there. There was too much ground to cover in twos. Besides, Magozzi and Gino and about a hundred other officers were there. I was hardly alone.’

He just sat there looking at her, shaking his head.

‘Babysitting me is not your job, Sampson.’ For some reason that made him smile a little.

‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong. It was exactly my job. I made a deal.’

‘A deal with whom?’

‘Bitterroot.’

She puzzled over that for a second, decided she wasn’t getting anywhere, then sat down opposite him and waited until he met her eyes. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Sheriff Bulardo was going to pull Bitterroot’s gun permits.’

‘Why on earth would he do that? You said yourself you never had a single trouble call out there.’

‘He was pissed. His wife checked into Bitterroot last summer.’

Iris felt her eyes getting bigger. She couldn’t seem to stop them. ‘Oh, my.’

‘Trouble is, no one would run against him. The guys in the department who might have knew damn well they’d lose their jobs afterward unless they beat him, and beating him was impossible. No way this county would elect a deputy over a sheriff when from the outside, the sheriff seemed to be doing an okay job. And then out of the blue, this brand-new deputy on dispatch that nobody knows puts her name on the ticket.’ He grinned a little. ‘That was a David and Goliath move if ever there was one. Why the hell did you do that, anyway? You had to know it was career suicide. Most of us figured you for some kind of hotshot crusader. The martyr type.’

Iris shook her head. ‘It was nothing that noble. Bulardo caught me in a supply closet my second night on dispatch and made some pretty offensive advances. So I slapped him. Really slapped him. Now that was career suicide.’

‘You slapped Sheriff Bulardo?’ Sampson was trying not to laugh.

‘I did. And that’s when he promised that I would never, ever get off the dispatch desk as long as he was in office. See what I mean? No nobility at all. I didn’t have a thing to lose by running for sheriff, and I did it for all the wrong reasons. I was just thumbing my nose at a man who’d hurt me, and no one was more surprised than I was when I got elected.’

Sampson was still smiling. ‘We got lucky there. Most people stopped bothering to vote in the sheriff’s race a long time ago. But this time Bitterroot voted in a block. Every single one of them made it to the polls that day, a lot of them leaving the complex for the first time since they arrived. It was a big deal. And it was just enough to turn the tide.’

Iris closed her eyes. ‘Terrific. Bitterroot got me elected to save themselves, and now I’m the one who has to decide whether or not to start an investigation that could shut them down.’

‘Yeah. I didn’t see that coming, either.’

‘What am I going to do, Sampson?’

He tipped his head and looked at her for a long time. ‘The right thing.’

‘I don’t know what that is.’

‘You will, when the time comes.’

Magozzi pulled to a stop in Iris’s circular driveway halfway between a big, weathered barn and an old-fashioned, white-railing porch that looked like a great place to drink lemonade and pass the time on a steamy summer day, although that was a hard scene to imagine this morning.

He put the car in park, but didn’t turn off the engine; he just sat there with his wrists draped over the steering wheel, squinting hard out the window, as he always did when he was really thinking something out. Blocks of color was the way he thought of it. The devil might be in the details, but unless you squinted every now and then, you’d miss the big picture. Which is exactly what had happened.

Magozzi’s eyes and head shifted back into close focus and he tapped a finger on the windshield at the falling snow splatting on the glass. ‘Snow blind,’ he said to Gino. ‘That’s what we were.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean we followed the Weinbeck connection because it was the easy trail. The path of least resistance…’

‘Now, just wait a minute, Leo. We can’t beat ourselves up for that. We had a third snowman, for Christ’s sake. We had no choice but to look at Weinbeck, and for a while, he looked pretty damn good.’

‘Yeah, but that’s all we looked at. What we should have been paying attention to from the get-go were the victims and their families. That’s the first place we always look, but this is the one time we didn’t, because Weinbeck stormed onto the scene so fast. Pittsburgh made the same mistake, probably because they were figuring copycat.’

Gino was genuinely confounded. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about your average homicide, and how you usually don’t have to look very far to find the murderer. You know how rare stranger killings are.’

‘Sure, but Deaton and Myerson were not average homicides…’

‘The way they died wasn’t average, but the motive probably was. We weren’t even in the forest, Gino. Not even close.’ He looked over at his partner. ‘Get on the horn to McLaren. Have him check 911 calls and ER records at local hospitals for Mary Deaton.’

Gino’s expression cleared slowly as it dawned on him what it was Magozzi had been trying to say. ‘Holy shit. Mary Deaton. The nose job.’

Magozzi nodded grimly. ‘That maybe wasn’t a nose job.’

Gino was shaking his head miserably. ‘Goddamnit, Leo, Deaton was a cop.’

‘It happens, Gino. A lot. You know it does.’

He thought for a moment. ‘No way Mary Deaton had anything to do with this. She doesn’t have the physique, for one thing, and she’s got that abused-woman mentality going, or she would have put his ass in jail a long time ago.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of Mary Deaton.’

Gino looked at him for a second, then flipped open his phone and dialed the office.

They sat in absolute silence in Iris’s driveway, waiting for McLaren to call back. It didn’t take long. Gino listened for a few minutes, nodding occasionally, but not bothering to take notes. ‘Thanks, Johnny,’ he finally said. ‘Follow it wherever it leads.’

He hung up and looked over at Magozzi. ‘Mary Deaton went into Hennepin County ER for a broken nose two nights before her husband was killed. First time they’d ever seen her. No 911 history, either, so McLaren got a wild hair and started calling other ERs. She had a file in every one of them, one visit each. He got up to five and called us, but he’s still checking. You know how many hospitals we’ve got in the Twin Cities area? And here’s something interesting. Guess who took her in every time.’

‘Her husband. Tommy Deaton.’

‘No cigar. His partner, Toby Myerson. Son of a bitch. That bastard had to know what was happening.’

‘He’s not the only one.’ Magozzi turned and looked at him head-on. ‘What would you do if it was your kid, Gino? If it was Helen?’

Gino didn’t answer him.

By the time Magozzi and Gino finally got out of the car and headed up to Iris’s porch, a weak sunrise was trying to lighten the dingy, snow-speckled sky. Iris and Sampson were both peering out at them through the kitchen window, probably wondering what the hell they’d been doing in the car for so long.

As Iris opened the door to gesture them in, the smell of homemade soup nearly knocked them both down. Gino smiled a little sheepishly when his stomach roared loudly enough for everybody to hear. ‘Sorry.’

‘Sit down,’ Iris grabbed two clean bowls from a cupboard above the stove.

Magozzi was suffering the ill effects of skipping breakfast, too, just not as audibly as Gino. ‘We appreciate it, Sheriff, but we really don’t have time.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Bitterroot. Your jurisdiction, so we’d like you both to come along.’

‘Fine.’ She slapped spoons in their hands. ‘Then spoon it right out of the pot while we get our boots and coats on. You both look like you’re ready to pass out.’

Gino’s resolve weakened the minute the spoon hit his hand, and he was on his way to the stove when Magozzi’s voice stopped him.

‘Not even time for that. We’ve got to get back out there before Bill and Alice Warner leave.’

Iris’s brow furrowed a little when Magozzi mentioned the names. ‘The relatives who were on their way to Laura’s?’

Sampson had his coat halfway up his arms, then let it drop to his chair. ‘Relax. Our deputies just checked in from out there. The local doc ended up giving Laura a sedative when she got a little wild, and the Warners are babysitting until she comes around. You’ve got time for a bowl, and you’d be crazy to pass it up.’

Gino was a happy man, already at the stove, working the ladle.

Iris was standing by the door, one boot on, one in her hand.

‘Their last name is Warner?’

‘Right. Bill and Alice. They’re the in-laws… were the in-laws of one of the cops we pulled out of the Minneapolis snowmen. Tommy Deaton. We just found out he was abusing his wife big time.’

‘Oh, man,’ Sampson was shaking his head. ‘This isn’t good. It keeps coming back to Bitterroot.’

‘Tell me about it. Every time we try to get away from this place we keep getting jerked back. I’m starting to feel like I’ve got a rubber band around my ankle and Dundas County is holding the other end.’ Gino delivered a bowl of soup to Magozzi and started slurping his own. Sure, it looked like they had a little time, but Magozzi never took things like that for granted, and he’d be pulling him out the door in a second.

Iris was pulling her second boot on in slow motion, and Magozzi knew how that worked. Back in the days when he still thought jogging was sensible, he’d be humping it around one of the city lakes at a good clip, thinking about a case, and pretty soon he’d find himself moving like a snail. When the mind was really working, the body slowed.

‘Alice Warner was the name on the deed to this house,’ Iris said, straightening and looking at Magozzi. ‘The daughter of Emily, who owned this house and probably killed her husband. And now you tell me she’s the mother-in-law of a murdered abuser? Now I’m really wondering what these women are teaching their daughters.’

Sampson looked at Magozzi. ‘You like the Warners for your two snowmen?’

‘We’re leaning that way.’

‘How sure are you?’

‘Not at all. That’s what we’re going to find out. We’ll tell you the rest in the car.’