Snow Blind

32

They didn’t call ahead this time; just stopped at the big gates and waited for Liz, the guard they’d met yesterday, to check them in.

‘We’ve got to get back to Laura’s house, Liz,’ Sampson told her when he rolled down the driver’s window.

She looked tired today, frustrated. ‘You and every other cop in the free world.’ She bent to look in the SUV, nodded at Iris, then Gino and Magozzi in the back. ‘Same crew as yesterday?’

‘That’s right. How many of our people are still out here?’

Liz actually scowled at him. ‘We had to keep the gates open when you people first started moving in so fast. First time since the fence went up. I have no idea how many people came in, or how many went out. Every bit of security we had on the perimeter was gone in a heartbeat.’

‘Sorry, Liz. We didn’t have a choice.’

She found a little smile for him. ‘Yeah, I know that. It’s just a little weird, you know? All these strangers tromping around, and nobody knows who anybody is… We’re not used to that.’

‘We’ll clear out as soon we can.’

They parked next to the few other squads left in the lot, then took the shortest route around the corporate building and followed the narrow road out to Laura’s house.

It occurred to Magozzi that he’d never heard the old woman’s last name. Not that it mattered much at this point, it just seemed a strange omission. You always asked for a full name and the correct spelling, whether you were interviewing a doer or a witness, because if you sent in a report without those details, they’d ship you back to night classes on investigation.

‘Damn, I’m sick of this,’ Gino complained as they slogged through the new snow that just kept piling up. ‘These pants are so wet my legs are getting moldy, and it just keeps snowing.’ He stomped his feet when they made it around the building and hit the little plowed road.

‘How do want to handle this?’ Iris asked as they made their way through the little patch of woods and out into the open. Laura’s farmhouse was visible just ahead.

‘Gino will lead on the interview,’ Magozzi said. ‘We’re feeling our way here, and don’t want to spook them with the recorder, so we’ll need good notes from everybody. Words, yeah, but reactions are going to tell us a lot, too. Wait until Gino closes down his end if you think of something you want to ask.’

Bill Warner opened the front door. He looked exactly as he had that day at Mary Deaton’s house. Neat gray brush cut, good physique, a cop’s eyes in a tired face. He would have been told they’d been here before, of course, but he looked a little surprised to see them back.

Good, Magozzi thought. Got him a little off balance, anyway.

‘Come in, come in,’ he widened the door and gestured them inside. ‘Not fit for man nor beast, and all that. Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth, right? You remember me?’

‘Of course, Mr Warner.’

‘The name is Bill, remember?’

‘Thank you. This is Sheriff Rikker and Lieutenant Sampson, Dundas County. How’s your daughter Mary doing?’

‘As well as can be expected, under the circumstances. We’ve got Tommy’s funeral to go yet, of course, and Toby’s. What happened here tonight isn’t going to make it any easier, especially if there’s some backlash against Laura we have to deal with.’

Magozzi said, ‘I don’t see that happening. It’s Dundas’s call, of course, but we were all on scene and agree that it seems like a pretty straightforward case of self-defense.’

‘A pretty impressive case of self-defense,’ Gino added. ‘She did some fast thinking on her feet for a lady that age.’

Bill nodded. ‘Laura’s a pistol; always has been…’ He faltered then, apparently realizing how inappropriate his choice of words had been. ‘Unfortunately, her mind’s been slipping for years now, but she still has her moments. Can I take your coats?’

Magozzi shook his head. ‘Thanks, no. I don’t think we’ll be long.’

‘Well, come in at least, sit by the fire and warm up.’

Once they were settled, Magozzi looked around. The body was gone, of course, and Iris’s men had collected the area rug. Otherwise the place looked relatively untouched. He saw a few traces of fingerprint powder on some surfaces, but they’d cleaned up pretty well.

Bill Warner followed his eyes. ‘The crime-scene unit left about fifteen minutes ago.’

‘Is Maggie Holland still here?’ Maggozi asked.

‘She left right after they did. Probably went home to pop a Valium or something. I know I would, if I’d had her night.’

Magozzi smiled. ‘Did your wife come with you today?’ he asked, as if he didn’t know the answer.

‘Yes, of course. Laura’s her great-aunt – I’m guessing Maggie told you that. Alice just went back to the bedroom to make sure she was still asleep.’

As if on cue, Alice Warner’s footsteps sounded in the hall, and she stepped through into the living room. She did a little double take to find it filled with people who hadn’t been there when she had left. ‘Hello?’

Magozzi, Gino, and Sampson stood up when Bill introduced them. They hadn’t gotten much of a look at her that first day at Mary Deaton’s house, let alone met her – she’d been totally focused on comforting her daughter when Bill had stepped aside to talk to them. She was almost as tall as her husband, and something about her was very nearly elegant, very self-possessed. She had a strong handshake and a stronger gaze. ‘Detectives. It’s a pleasure to meet you at last. Did Bill thank you for being so kind to our daughter on that terrible day?’

‘He most certainly did,’ Gino stepped in with an attempt at suave and friendly. ‘I know you must have had a trying morning, but do you have a moment to sit and chat with us?’

She gave Gino a gracious smile that made Magozzi think they were treading water here and maybe way over their heads.

When they were all seated, Bill and Alice Warner next to each other on the sofa, Bill looked at Magozzi and gave him a sad, friendly smile, and Magozzi realized he’d already pegged him as the one playing good cop. ‘I was surprised to hear you two were so far off the beaten path up here.’

Magozzi smiled back, and felt false. He hated this. ‘We followed the third snowman, the one Weinbeck built around the parole officer he’d killed. We thought at first it might be connected to your son-in-law and his partner.’

Bill made his eyebrows go up. ‘And was it?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Which is why we wanted to talk with you and your wife,’ Gino interjected, and the atmosphere in the room changed abruptly. Iris Rikker and Lieutenant Sampson pulled out their notebooks, and the Warners noticed.

Gino continued. ‘First, Bill, let me say this. I’ve got a daughter. Coming up on sixteen, this year. And I’d rip out the throat of anybody who hurt her.’

Bill and Alice Warner didn’t even flinch.

‘So I get that. I get it big time. Now my question to you is this: Did you know your daughter was being abused?’

It was a slow, disdainful blink. ‘Of course I did, Detective. You think I’m stupid? Blind? What? Twenty-five years on the force. I’ve seen it a thousand times, just like you have. You think I’d miss that?’

Gino nodded. ‘So I’m thinking, you and me, we’re a lot alike. We’ve both got daughters, we’re both cops, we know what’s going on, I’m guessing you weren’t going to just sit idle while Tommy beat up Mary whenever the spirit moved him, and the guy was escalating. The ER visits were clumping up. He was going off.’

Bill gave him a flat stare. ‘You’re going the wrong way, Detective. I know you have to look at it, but I spent a lot of years enforcing the law, not breaking it.’

Magozzi thought that was a pretty mild reaction from a man who just learned he was a possible suspect in a double homicide. Then again, a controlled response was the hallmark of any good cop, and Warner would be a cop until the day they put him in the ground.

‘So when did you first learn what was going on, Bill?’ Gino asked him.

‘For sure? A few months ago. And once we knew, we did what we could. Tried to get Mary to leave Tommy, tried to get her to press charges, begged her to come up here to Bitterroot, and when she wouldn’t do any of those things, we went all over the legal system, starting with some friends of mine who are still at the Second, but without Mary’s testimony, everybody’s hands were tied. After that, there was only one thing I could do.’

‘And what was that?’

Bill Warner smiled a little. ‘Exactly the same thing you’d do in that situation, Detective Rolseth. I went over there and beat the shit out of him. Told him if he ever hurt my daughter again I’d kill him.’

Gino was working hard to keep his expression neutral. Sure, he felt for the guy, he got it big time, but even when someone’s hurting your kid, you can’t just go out and plug him, right?

What would you do if it was your kid, Gino? If it was Helen?

He shook his head a little, dislodging that question, because the answer didn’t matter. Couldn’t matter when you were a cop trying to nail a killer.

‘And you know what Mary did?’ Bill was saying. ‘She kicked us out of the house, told us she didn’t want to see or talk to us again until we apologized to the son of a bitch, and she didn’t. Not until the day Tommy died.’ He sagged back on the sofa as if the telling had exhausted him. Alice Warner patted his hand, but her expression remained impassive.

Gino gave him a sympathetic look. ‘I think it’s pretty obvious you’ve both had a hell of a time, and we’re damn sorry for that, but the thing is, we’ve still got an unsolved double, and like you said, Bill, we have to look at everything.’

‘I know.’

‘So. You were at the Second when the Snowman bust went down, right?’

That seemed to surprise him, but he recovered quickly. ‘I was.’

‘So you knew all about it.’

Magozzi was watching Bill Warner closely, and saw the skin tighten around his eyes.

‘Along with about a million other people. It hit the papers, the TV news.’

‘But you followed the case closer than most, I’ll bet, because Tommy was a key witness.’

‘I suppose.’

‘Let me tell you how it went, Bill. After Tommy and Toby were killed, we got some information that maybe the Snowman was knocking off some witnesses before his trial next week, putting them in snowmen to scare off the other witnesses. But then we caught wind of a few things that started us thinking in other directions, and the Snowman stopped looking so good for it.’ He paused to give that time to sink in. ‘That’s when we started toying with the idea that maybe there was somebody else out there who wanted Tommy and Toby dead for other reasons, and they used the Snowman as a blind. And, hell, framing a scumbag like the Snowman for murder – who cares? He’s probably going to do life anyway. It was a pretty sweet setup, when you think about it.’

Bill Warner snorted. ‘Pretty damn elaborate setup, especially for the kind of pinheads who usually go around killing people.’

Gino smiled. ‘That’s exactly what we thought. At first we thought the killings were pretty clean – not perfect, mind you – but almost’ – he saw the Warners glance at each other, then quickly away – ‘so you start thinking who knows enough to leave a clean crime scene?’

Bill shrugged. ‘Anybody who reads or watches TV, for starters. CSI is killing us.’

‘Tell me about it. But the field narrows a whole lot when you start asking who would want Tommy and Toby dead.’

Warner had had enough. He leaned over his thighs and drilled Gino with a glare. ‘Stop treating me like some yahoo on the bad side of an interview desk, Detective. I’ve been on your end for too many years, so let’s cut to the chase. Alice and I were home together Friday night. All night.’

Alice nodded, frighteningly calm.

‘That’s good to know, Bill. I’m writing that down. Because the thing is, we just might have whoever murdered Tommy and Toby for a similar murder in Pittsburgh.’

It took him a second too long to respond. ‘Oh?’

‘Yeah. Pulled some stuff off the Internet, you know, from one of those super-secret chat rooms no one else is supposed to be able to get into? Only it can be done, of course, you just have to have the right people working on it, and we’ve got some good ones. They’re doing a trace on the sources now.’

Warner’s eyes narrowed and his forehead wrinkled as he thought about that for a minute, then he leaned back in the sofa and almost smiled. ‘That’s interesting, Detective, but you know how it is. People say all sorts of things in those chat rooms for all kinds of reasons. Fat people claim to be thin, hustlers claim to be doctors… they lie like crazy, telling strangers they’ve actually done the things they only wish they could do.’

Gino held his eyes. ‘Is that how it works?’

Warner nodded. ‘That’s how it works.’

Smart, Magozzi was thinking. He just set up a reasonable explanation for what he said in the chat room, just in case they traced it back to him. Not that it mattered. Online conversations were clues, not proof, and he probably knew that, too.

‘Anything else, Detectives?’

Iris waited half a second for Gino to say something, then jumped right in with a timid little smile that Magozzi thought was absolutely disarming. ‘I have one question for Mrs Warner, if you don’t mind, ma’am. It’s totally off the subject, more a matter of curiosity than anything else, just because I bought your mother’s house. It’s also very personal, so I completely understand if you’d rather not respond.’

Alice Warner actually smiled back at her, and the smile was genuine. ‘What is it, Sheriff?’

‘Well, I was wondering… we were told that you were raised here at Bitterroot by your grandmother Ruth, and Laura. But your mother lived so close.’

It was the first time Magozzi had seen Alice Warner exhibit any emotion at all. It wasn’t a bit hostile, but it wasn’t pretty, either. She looked down at her lap to hide it, then took a deep breath and met Iris’s eyes. ‘I was sexually abused by my father. My mother sent me away. Here, where she knew I’d be safe.’

‘I’m very sorry.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And I’m also very sorry to tell you that we found the remains of what may very well be your father in my barn this morning.’

Magozzi had never seen anyone’s eyes glitter before. Oh, you read about it in books, and people used the expression all the time, but he’d never really seen it on another human face.

‘Oh, my,’ Alice Warner said. ‘That’s very disturbing.’

But she didn’t look disturbed. Not at all.